Picasso’s Guernica Vandalism
Almost one year after Pablo Picasso’s death, in February 1974 a man enters the MOMA with a plan. He walks directly up to Picasso’s famous masterpiece Guernica and paints three, foot-high words across it in red spray paint. But who was he and what was his motivation? Even more interestingly, where is he now?
Picasso’s Guernica
Guernica is one of Pablo Picasso’s best-known paintings. He painted it in 1937 at his home in Paris in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque country town in northern Spain. The town was bombed by (at the time) Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. This painting has a powerful anti-war sentiment and depicts the suffering of war, specifically the Spanish Civil War. It helped draw attention to and raise funds for this conflict around the world. Initially, it toured around to different museums and galleries but in 1956 it was decided that for the painting’s safety it should remain at the MOMA for the foreseeable future. Picasso stipulated that he wanted the painting returned to Spain at some point after the Franco regime was over. So in September 1981 the painting returned and is now housed in the Museo Renia Sofia in Madrid.
The Crime at Hand
On the morning of February 28, 1974, a man walked into the MOMA. He was dressed in all black and he walked with purpose to Guernica. People looked on with horror as he calmly pulled a can of red spray paint from his jacket (those were the days of zero security) and sprayed three words across the canvass. He had planned to write LIES ALL KILL, an adaptation of a line from James Joyce’s Finnigans Wake, but he had poor planning skills and once he was finished writing LIES ALL he was at the end of the canvas so he just wrote KILL at the front. Wtf. So it said KILL LIES ALL. Which makes little to no sense.
He made no attempt to escape or conceal his identity in front of all the other people who were there. He waited for a guard to come and the police to be called. He handed the can over to security and when questioned he told guards to call the curator and that he was an artist and he wanted to tell the truth.
OK So Who Is This?
Great question. The answer is weird. This man’s name is Tony Shafrazi and while that name may not ring a bell he was actually pretty well connected in the world of art at the time. Let me give you some background.
Shafrazi was born in Iran and moved to London with his father to go to school, he was studying at the Royal College of Art where he was training to be an artist. He met Andy Warhol early on in his career while on a trip to New York. He was staying at a YMCA location directly across the street from Warhol’s factory and he just decided to walk on over and get involved. Somehow that worked and Shafrazi ended up moving to New York in 1969 after graduating. He ended up getting connected to other artists and big names in the industry but in the 1970s he was struggling to deal with the Watergate scandal as well as the Vietnam War.
As a result of these crises, he decided it was time to create his own artistic statement, a protest. “He became fixated on the idea of imposing a phrase on an actual Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns” (Freeman, 2018). He settled, obviously, on Guernica because of its anti-war sentiment.
Got That, Why Did He Do It?
Basically, his motivations were twofold. Firstly, he wanted to create a piece of conceptual art. He wanted to almost reach his hands into the creation of the painting itself and become involved with it. Secondly, he was protesting the Vietnam War, specifically the release on bail of a U.S. leutenent convicted for his role in the My Lai massacare.
What Happened After?
As I said, the guards grabbed him pretty quickly, he made no attempt to hide or run. They took him into the bathroom for interrogation and he was then handed off to the police.
As for the painting, luckily Sue Sack the conservator from the Brooklyn Museum happened to be having lunch at the MOMA that day so she joined the team of technicians who immediately started work. Because the painting was covered in a thick layer of varnish (yay varnish!) they were able to get all the red paint off with relative ease using a solvent and surgical scalples and needles. The painting had to be revarnished but there was no lasting damage and all the paint was removed the same day as the attack. Thank goodness.
Back to Shafrazi, he was charged with criminal mischief for this crime. But, because the conservators and technicians were able to get all the paint off within an hour and there was no lasting damage his lawyer managed to get him off on five years probation. *eye roll*. When the judge asked him if he would ever do something like this again he said no, it would be crazy to repeat an act like that. The judge wanted to know why he did it in the first place then and he just said it had to be done.
This little stunt basically only brought good things Shafrazi’s way after that. Soon after, the Shah of Iran wanted to build up his contemporary art collection and hired Shafrazi to help him do that. Unfortunately (for him) the Iranian revolution started before this job could be finished but it had given him the idea to open a gallery of his own in New York. He was drawn to graffiti artists and thought that he could give them a space to show their work in a real gallery. Some of his earliest clients were Futura, Keith Haring, and Kenny Sharf. He also hosted a collaborative exhibition between Andy Warhol and Basquiat. He had become an incredibly successful art dealer and gallerist and in 1998 the Francis Bacon estate chose Shafrazi to be their American representative.
All this to say, his past crime did nothing to turn people off from working with him. His clients have included people like Donald Trump and Larry Silversiten (the developer of the rebuilt World Trade Centre). In 2008 he had a huge party and exhibition at his gallery in New York. A cake was brought out with an image of Guernica on the top. Shafrazi was handed a tube of red icing and he wrote I’M SORRY. Followed shortly after by NOT.
Works Cited
Freeman, Nate. “How Tony Shafrazi Went from Vandalizing Guernica to Inventing a Market for Graffiti Art”. Artsy. 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-tony-shafrazi-vandalizing-guernica-inventing-market-graffiti-art
Kaufman, Michael T. “Gurenica Survives a Spray-Paint Attack by a Vandal”. The New York Times. 1974. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/01/archives/guernica-survives-a-spraypaint-attack-by-vandal-floor-is-sealed-off.html