De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

2: To Italy and Back

22 2 To Italy and Back The teachers must have liked me, because they always kept me after school. —De Grazia1 The Trip To iTaly made a strong impression on young Ted. The De Grazias were crammed into the ship’s hold for a week with dozens of other passengers. De Grazia never forgot the putrid smells of vomit and bodies that had gone too many days without baths. “Oh, it was like a nightmare,” he told his daughter, Lucia, years later. “I never want to see a boat as long as I live.”2 He became a committed desert rat. “I don’t like the ocean because I don’t understand it,” he said on a trip to the Gulf of California in 1978. “I’m afraid of it, too. I’m not fond of water.”3 Another time he wrote, “I love the desert, but I don’t care for the sea. I don’t fish. I don’t even swim. I don’t care too much for drinking water, either.”4 Ted’s family thought they would spend only six months in Italy, but when it came time to leave, De Grazia’s maternal grandparents broke down in tears over the likelihood of not seeing their children and grandchildren again. Then-four-year-old Frenck recalled, years later, seeing “the emotional drama that was displayed.” The grandmother became bedridden for a couple of years, which, Frenck said, “I reasoned was a put-on ploy.” The family decided to stay. While in Italy, young Ted staged shows for other children with his guitar and a trumpet that he had recently learned to play, covering a To Italy and Back 23 storm culvert with a sheet to look like a stage. Frenck collected the two-cent fee.5 Also in Amantea, De Grazia became exposed to the art of the Catholic church once again. The church of Saint Bernardino of Siena, built in a Romanesque-Gothic style featuring “a lancet window surmounted by a cross with nine ceramic dishes,” may have been one of them.6 After watching the church decorators and artists, Ted again took up working with clay. He also began to paint religious themes.7 “I still consider the church art of Italy to be some of the finest ever painted by man,” he once said.8 De Grazia’s mother wanted him to become a priest, but he balked at a religious life. He spent more time painting than he did studying church law.9 Once, when it became his responsibility to pump the organ during High Mass, he quit pumping in the middle of a service, which of course stopped the music. Two monks picked him up by the ears, led him down some spiral stairs, “and out [he] went.”10 After that, De Grazia never formally participated in church life. His paintings, however, reflect a deep reverence for all things religious. As writer Elizabeth Shaw put it, “Mysticism was an element in the painter’s nature, but as a non-conformist in religion, he maintained to the church the relationship of a loving but canny and critical son.”11 In 1925 the De Grazia clan decided to return to Morenci, the family apparently afraid that Greg, Ted, and Frenck could be recruited into Benito Mussolini’s fascist youth movement.12 Back home and now sixteen, De Grazia painted three works that were remarkable, if one considers his age and that he undoubtedly had had very little, if any, formal training as an artist. The paintings were favorites of his throughout his life. They survive today in the collection of the De Grazia Gallery in the Sun: the first in oil, twenty-four by sixteen inches, called Indian Faces, of two Indians holding a candle; the second an eighteen-by-eighteen-inch oil called 4 Horses, depicting a black horse on either side of two white horses; and the third a twenty-three-by-fifteen-inch oil entitled Three Sad Women, of mourning women, the sadness based on his exposure to religious art and the culture of Mexican families living in Morenci.13 De Grazia and his siblings grew up in a home devoted to music. His father played guitar, and his mother played classical music on the piano. All seven children had instruments before shoes; this, during chapTer 2 24 the period when they were so poor Domenico had to put...