De Grazia Commercial Works

Sherri owns a framed image of a Native American mother and child (Navajo Madonna) signed “De Grazia.” Yes, it’s signed. Yes, it feels like a painted surface. But no, it’s not a painting, Sherri.

This print has been overlaid with a texture, along with the signature. The Tucson-based Gallery of the Sun, De Grazia’s studio before he died, authorized this copy of an original. An adoring public still visits De Grazia’s studio. The National Register of Historic Places listed the gallery, which speaks to his commercial success.

DeGrazia’s Success

What did De Grazia do to make his work so successful and so ubiquitous? He became a natural marketer and networker back in the 1940s. And he met the right connection in Scottsdale, AZ, in Alvin Lee “Buck” Saunders.

Saunders, a civil engineer, worked on the Kingman Gunnery Range in 1941 as well as the Veteran’s Hospital in Phoenix. His artistically inclined wife, Leobarda, joined him in opening the first art gallery in Scottsdale, the Scottsdale Trading Post, on March 1, 1949. This happened way before Scottsdale became incorporated, and the average home sold for $600,000 as it does today.

De Grazia met Saunders, who liked simple and easy-to-understand artists. He gave Olaf Wieghorst and Pop Chalee their first one-man shows at the Trading Post. Saunders, a sentimentalist and a man’s man, liked Ettore (Ted) De Grazia’s work. De Grazia, also a romantic sentimentalist, thought he identified with and understood the Native Americans of 1930-40 Arizona. He became fascinated with the Navajo people in 1930, notably painting sweet, waiflike Navajo children herding sheep on the barren land of the reservation.

De Grazia and the Navajo

Actually, conditions on the Navajo lands during this period became dire. In regard to herding, the Livestock Reduction Act of 1932 sanctioned the killing of 80 percent of the people’s herding stock, considered “family.” The Navajo Nation considered this bad period  from 1930-40 the Second Long Walk. The First happened when the government paraded them at gunpoint to New Mexico in 1864. So innocent serenity fell out of the picture, but De Grazia’s pictures best portrayed this innocent serenity. De Grazia identified with the otherness of the Navajo people, as an immigrant himself, from a small town in Italy.

He loved the Navajo child motif and built a studio-gallery outside of Tucson decorated with his version of Mexican and Indian motifs modeled on the Mexican hacienda, romanticized, of course, in the Santa Catalina Mountains. His biography gives his reason for choosing the motif of lonely Indian children. He became fascinated by the purity of their lives before the infiltration of white civilization. Maybe, but the world portrayed in his cute little portraits glossed over some important realities.

Saunders gave Ted De Grazia his first one-man show at the Scottsdale Trading Post in 195. The account in De Grazia’s biography calls it a smashing success. On the heels of this success, De Grazia gained the inspiration to go to New York to pursue other avenues for his images. These included textile design, decals, collector’s plates, needlepoints, key chains, greeting cards, children’s books, prints, giclees and serigraphs. Interesting that this artist who romanticized and celebrated purity in life went whole hog into commercializing his images.

Financial Success

In the 1960s, UNICEF commissioned a Christmas card image from him. He called it Los Niños, again of Native American children, which sold five million boxes, a great deal at the time. The New York pace of life caught up with the artist, and he left for home in Arizona. His biography says he felt unhappy away from the Indian subject matter that inspired him. He indeed achieved huge financial success in New York.

Ted De Grazia liked his financial success, if we judge by an action he took in 1976. His New York Times obituary of Sept. 18, 1982, states Ted De Grazia made headlines in 1976. He rode horseback into the rugged Superstition Mountains of Central Arizona to burn 100 of his paintings to protest U.S. tax laws. The obituary states “Mr. De Grazia said he burned (his paintings) because the Internal Revenue Service, by comparing his work with (De Grazia’s) market values, made him (here the Times obituary quotes De Grazia as saying at the time of the burning) ‘a millionaire on paper and my heirs will have to pay taxes for which there is no money.’ “

De Grazia’s Buried Paintings

The Tucson Citizen of Jan. 18, 2011, reported something that made matters more commercially interesting. Among the ten horsemen who witnessed the painting bonfire of 1976, two, Ward and a Ogle (now in their 80s and 90s) said De Grazia entrusted them with secret knowledge. De Grazia buried eighteen paintings, which the two old gents claim are worth an aggregate $18 million. They claim they’re hermetically sealed and buried somewhere in the desert since 1976.

Sherri, your image is a print worth between $30 and $100. Ted De Grazia sure did some great salesmanship in his day. The Tucson Citizen reports De Grazia’s artistic effort at making a low-budget Western film, he entitled The End of the Rainbow, staring himself. In it, he and a lady friend are kidnapped and forced to lead the kidnappers to a hoard of buried paintings. One of the kidnappers is played by Mr. Ogle (“Two Guns”). The late beautiful country western singer Sammi Smith, famous for her record “Help Me Make it Through the Night” of 1970s fame played the lady friend.