De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

15: Honors for the Artist

145 15 Honors for the Artist I don’t like the word famous. It carries too much responsibility. I prefer notorious. —De Grazia1 in 1961, a Tucson daily ciTizen reporter asked De Grazia how he felt about his long road to success. The artist, typically contemptuous , responded, “How I feel about it is more important than the johnny-come-lately opinions of academic specialists and art dilettantes .” The reporter, Gene Brooks, wrote, “People in his home town hadn’t yet warmed to De Grazia’s talents or simple ways. . . . Many Tucsonians [sic] still wonder, often in suspicious tones, ‘What’s with this guy? Is he a real artist?’ Others comment simply, ‘He’s a character,’ and let it go at that.”2 At least one critic seemed to capture De Grazia’s essence in his review of a one-man show of paintings and sculptures in November 1963 at the Tucson Art Center. “In general De Grazia’s work is not particularly impressive from a purely artistic point of view, however, the works represented . . . do convey a feeling. They are, therefore, successful in expressing the artist’s theme. The pictures are colorful and sensitive, and certainly indicate sincerity—something which is often not in evidence in some academically more perfect works.”3 De Grazia’s most ambitious series of paintings up to this point in his career was The Way of the Cross, which he painted in 1964. The Reverend Robert L. Graff commissioned the paintings for the chapTer 15 146 Saint Thomas More Catholic Newman Center near the University of Arizona. De Grazia expressed reluctance to do the paintings because he thought someone “who goes to church every Sunday” should do them.4 But the more he thought about it, the better he felt. He had, after all, been raised a Catholic. De Grazia called the paintings The Way of the Cross instead of The Stations of the Cross, which number fourteen, because he added a fifteenth painting depicting Christ’s resurrection, saying the death of Jesus had no value unless he was resurrected.5 He painted Christ in the series variously as a white man, an African American, a Native American, and an Asian. Saguaro cacti and Indians appear in the backgrounds, giving the paintings a southwestern look. De Grazia used bold colors and a technique that conveyed a strong sense of emotion and symbolism. The smallest painting is sixteen inches by ten inches; the largest, thirty-six inches by twenty-seven inches. De Grazia concentrated so intensely on the project that he slept little and didn’t smoke or drink until the entire series had been completed . He called it a “deep religious experience. It was simple, yet exciting—a work on the sensual unity of mankind.”6 The paintings hung on loan in the Newman Center for a year before De Grazia removed them. According to De Grazia’s friend Louise DeWald, the Catholic church “got on a holier than thou decree and said that he was no longer a good Catholic because of his lifestyle.” When the church threatened to excommunicate him, DeWald said, a “furious” De Grazia gathered up his paintings and brought them back to the Gallery in the Sun,7 where they go on display every year during Lent. In 1964 De Grazia also finished his eight-by-twelve-foot mosaic mural Desert Medicine Man. The mural, made of glass and tile and weighing three and a half tons, was to be displayed at the Sherwood Medical Terrace at 8230 East Broadway. “We desired not only a decorative piece, but also one rendered in materials that would preserve the distinctive work of this artist for several generations,” said the building’s developer, Ted Tietz. De Grazia worked on the mural with Charles Clement, also a Tucson painter and sculptor, who laid the tile and glass following De Grazia’s two-by-three-foot painting of the mural design. When a huge crane lifted the ninety-six-square-foot mural into place on a hot Honors for the Artist 147 day in July, it sank into the soft ground and melting asphalt. They had to wait until that night to put it into place.8 Climate and exposure eventually damaged the mural, so it was moved to De Grazia’s gallery for restoration in 1991. The mural sits west of the De Grazias’ original house, helping to block the view of...