Tony Shafrazi

Tony Shafrazi is the owner of the Shafrazi Art Gallery in New York, who deals artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle.

Shafrazi was born in Abadan, Iran to ChristianArmenian parents who divorced when he was two. At the age of 13, his father – an oil-company executive – and stepmother took Shafrazi to England and left him to study there. He first went to a vicarage in Bilston, then to boarding school in Whittlebury and later Hammersmith College of Art & Building. He attended the Royal College of Art from 1963 to 1967 before coming to New York in 1969, where he lectured at several universities, including the School of Visual Arts.

On February 28, 1974, Shafrazi spray-painted Picasso's painting Guernica, which hung in the Museum of Modern Art, with the words "KILL LIES ALL" in foot-high letters. When a guard finally grabbed him, Shafrazi shouted, "Call the curator. I am an artist." The paint was easily removed as the painting was heavily varnished. It is believed that Shafrazi was protesting the announcement, the day before, of the release on bail of U.S. lieutenant William Calley. Calley, then under house arrest following his conviction, in 1971, for his part in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, had petitioned for habeas corpus; he had initially been sentenced to life imprisonment. Although his appeal was overturned in June, he was finally released from U.S. Army custody later in the year after having received a limited pardon from Richard Nixon. Shafrazi was a member of the Art Workers' Coalition, which in 1970 had staged a protest at MoMA by unfurling a copy of the famous My Lai protest poster And babies in front of the Guernica painting, which itself depicts the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon innocent civilians. Shafrazi was later given five years' probation, without a trial.

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