De Grazia Artist Views
DeGrazia continued creating his early paintings in Bisbee and by 1941, Raymond Carlson, editor of Arizona Highways, started publishing features about the artist. Then on a rare vacation to Mexico City in 1942, DeGrazia and his wife left an evening ballet performance and headed to the Palacio Municipal where muralist Diego Rivera was working. This chance encounter led to an internship with Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, plus a solo exhibition of DeGrazia's paintings at the prestigious Palacio de Bellas Artes.
New York sculptor Marion Sheret met the artist when visiting his Campbell Avenue studio. As she recalled, his first words to her were Where have you been? They married in the jungles of Mexico in 1947 and bought the 10-acre foothills site in the early 1950s to build what became DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun.
To protest inheritance taxes on works of art, DeGrazia hauled about 100 of his paintings on horseback into the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix and set them ablaze in 1976. This infamous event was reported in such publications as The Wall Street Journal and People magazine, becoming part of DeGrazia's legend before his death in 1982. By this time, the artist had established the DeGrazia Foundation to ensure the permanent preservation of his art and architecture for future generations.
Ettore Ted DeGrazia (June 14, 1909 – September 17, 1982) was an American impressionist, western-pop painter, sculptor, and lithographer. Self-described as the world's most reproduced artist , DeGrazia is known for his pastel images of Native American children of the American Southwest and other Western scenes.
De Grazia Artist Images
