Tony Shafrazi and the Art of the Comeback

Things had a way of just happening in the small, tight-knit New York art world of the 1960s and ’70s. Artists introduced other artists to dealers, who in turn introduced them to more artists. Tony Shafrazi arrived in New York in the late sixties, a transplant from Iran by way of London. Within 24 hours, he had met Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Through Richard Serra, he was introduced to Zadik Zadikian, a sculptor from Yerevan, Soviet Armenia, obsessed with plaster and gold leaf. Zadikian became the first artist Shafrazi ever exhibited.

“I didn’t even know he was Armenian then,” Zadikian recalled of Shafrazi last week. “Later, I stayed with him for nine months.”

That was in 1978, when Shafrazi brought Zadikian’s 1,000 Gold Bricks to his new gallery in Tehran. The installation was as literal as it was metaphorical—gold as hope, as temple, as absurdity. Months later it was gone, swept away by the revolution.

“We lost each and every brick in the revolution,” Zadikian said.

This week marks a reunion—and a comeback—for both men, now in their 80s, with Shafrazi showing Zadikian’s work at the Independent 20th Century fair in New York. Shafrazi has not exhibited at a fair since 2012, when he showed his own work at Art Basel and was swiftly banned for breaking the fair’s unspoken rule. He closed his New York gallery in 2011.

In his booth at Independent, Zadikian’s column of gilded plaster bricks, Made in USA, echoes Brancusi’s Infinite Column and nods to the first work he showed with Shafrazi back in the ’70s. Alongside Zadikian’s work, Shafrazi is presenting a multi-panel set of canvases painted to resemble Jiffy baking-mix boxes by Brandon Deener.

Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder, said she had never seen a dealer treat a booth with such intensity. “He’s more involved in this presentation than anything in his life as a dealer,” she told me over the phone last week. “He’s involved like an artist, like a writer, like a producer, and it shows that caring more, not less, is what makes the market follow you.”

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At Casa Cipriani, the chic maritime-themed hotel and private club in lower Manhattan—a short walk from Independent—Tony Shafrazi is a known presence and a frequent guest. Every staff member seems to know the dealer’s eccentricities and is smitten by them. Though Shafrazi now lives in Palm Beach, he is in New York often, and always stays at the hotel.

Late last week, he called me to meet him at Cipriani’s restaurant for a late breakfast. The textures of the room read as luxury without tipping into caricature: thick, brownish-purple carpets, polished wood, and lavishly upholstered barrel chairs with gold accents encircling dinner tables draped in nearly floor-length cloths. The host guided me to a table at the back of the dining room, and when Shafrazi arrived, he was dressed in sync with the décor: a well-worn pink-and-yellow striped oxford shirt, cream linen pants, and a black quilted jacket, his cloud of white hair characteristically disheveled. Behind him, though the restaurants floor to ceiling windows, sailboats and ferries were gliding across an incandescent East River under a blue sky.

For those who know Shafrazi only as an anecdote or a curiosity, his return might be jarring. He is remembered in shorthand: the man who, in 1974, spray-painted the words KILL LIES ALL on Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art (he was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and quickly released on $1,000 bail, paid in part by Richard Serra); the dealer who embraced graffiti art and gave Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat their stage; the impresario who sold Francis Bacon to American collectors with the zeal of a revivalist preacher. Those memories are true, but partial.

Dee sees his return as an argument. “He’s in it for the art and for the audience. Those two things. Nothing else,” she said, adding that she believes his presence proves that risk and care—not just branding—can still move markets.

Over tea and cake, Tony Shafrazi walked me through two minutely detailed pamphlets he is distributing at his Independent booth, one for each artist. Our conversation lasted over three hours, spanned centuries, and touched on everything from the Byzantine Empire to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Warhol’s drawing method. He spoke first about Memphis-born Brandon Deener, who came to painting after a career in music. His Independent debut—16 Jiffy baking-mix boxes, painted and repeated—sounds like a Warhol grid until you stand before it. Then it hums differently, warmer, more rhythm than irony. Deener’s practice is rooted in jazz. His paintings evolve like riffs. He has painted Miles Davis and John Coltrane, layering graffiti textures with lyrical lines.

“Players create an inspired melodic tune that comes from the particular nature of their instruments,” Shafrazi said. “And the sounds that they come up with, totally new, become the signature.”

Two years ago, Shafrazi took Deener on a trip through London and Paris, introducing him to monuments of Western art he had never studied formally. “After the trip, he came away with a greater vision of history, a greater vision of life, and a greater conception of what his art could address,” Shafrazi said. Deener’s first international solo show, “Resonance,” at Paris’s Galerie 75 Faubourg last year, featured 15 large oil paintings—a fusion of grief, resilience, and improvisation. What began as a personal channel became a practice of discovery. Jazz runs through the canvases like a heartbeat.

As for Zadikian—he and Shafrazi never stopped being friends, and the friendship has always been marked by Shafrazi’s persistence. “For five years he was pushing me” to do a presentation like the one now on view at Independent, Zadikian told me. “He said it would be a hundred times more powerful than PS1,” the MoMA-affiliated contemporary art center in Long Island City. Shafrazi propelled Zadikian throughout the process of building Made in USA. “We had five people working 13 hours a day for two weeks. One hundred seventy units—I’m exhausted,” Zadikian said. “But Tony contributed everything, even hunting down the right pigments from New York.”

Then our conversation—Shafrazi’s and mine—goes in every direction imaginable. It feels a little like talking to Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Shafrazi, like Pilgrim, slides between past, present, and future, often from sentence to sentence.

“Tony’s knowledge of art is beyond anybody I have met, dealer or artist,” Zadikian said. “He talks day and night, nonstop, just like he did back in the day.” For Zadikian, those torrents of speech are lessons. He teaches through stories. Conversations last two or three hours—for a few minutes you’re in Iran in the ’50s, then out West with Rauschenberg in the ’70s. Andy Warhol in the ’60s comes up before he jumps to Chelsea in the 2000s and then, without notice, recounts Venice’s history as a port city. It all comes together if you let it. Shafrazi lives inside history, refusing to watch from a distance. His identity has always been performative—a dealer who wants to be artist, critic, and historian at once. Admirers hear conviction; skeptics hear bluster. To him, they are the same thing.

The market has been through cycles of contraction and speculation since the last time Shafrazi showed at a fair, at the 2012 edition of Art Basel. On opening day, he presented a solo booth of works by, well, Tony Shafrazi. Since then, fairs have grown more bureaucratic, less theatrical. Dealers rely on strategic positioning and focus on what can sell.

Shafrazi’s famous phrase on Guernica has puzzled the art world for decades. Some assumed he meant “All Lies Kill.” He has insisted otherwise, saying he wrote exactly what he meant to write. Speaking with Jerry Saltz in 2008 for New York Magazine, Shafrazi described it as a Finnegans Wake–style construction, a phrase meant to work in either direction, and claimed the act was about retrieving the painting from art history, about making it “absolutely up to date, to give it life.” The painting, he said, had been neutralized by the museum wall. He wanted to make it scream again. That paradox—defacer and caretaker—has followed him ever since.

Five years after that incident, in 1979, he opened his first New York gallery in SoHo, when the neighborhood still felt like a rehearsal space for the art world to come. The streets were half-empty after dark, the lofts cavernous, the floors raw. Into that setting he brought artists who carried the city’s pulse on their sleeves: Haring with his chalk lines and restless urgency, Kenny Scharf’s explosions of cartoon color, Donald Baechler’s collages with their deliberate awkwardness. He also dealt in Bacon and Warhol, toggling between the canonical and the insurgent. The openings were not for the lighthearted. They were crowded and humid, half-party, half-spectacle. Collectors came not only to buy but to be seen buying—or simply to absorb whatever new energy was being released that night.

In those years, Shafrazi’s gallery was as much a stage as a business, and he played the role of impresario with gusto—welcoming some, provoking others, always ensuring that nobody left without a story. He liked to say that the responsibility of the dealer was to “make significant, meaningful exhibitions,” and he would often add, with the timing of a man who knew where the laugh line should fall, that the point was also to make some business happen, of course. The joke was part of the truth. To his peers, he was a hustler; to his artists, he was the one who saw them clearly enough to risk putting them in front of an audience.

By the 2000s, the scene had shifted. He withdrew from fairs, his reputation settling into anecdote: the vandal, the impresario, the hustler. But he never stopped. He sold privately, advised quietly, talked endlessly. After his 25th Street gallery closed in 2011, he began operating under the name Gallery Without Walls, a nod to André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls, in which the French thinker considered the democratization of art and the idea that everyone who looks at books or reproductions builds a personal museum, shaped by what they’ve seen. His return to Independent—and his way of thinking about art and life in general, down to the lengthy diversions and historical anecdotes—is all about understanding your own personal museum.

He has never outlived the mythology of Guernica. In 2008, his gallery hosted “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?,” a dizzying collaboration between dealer Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fischer that layered one show over another until the gallery became a hall of mirrors. The opening fell on his birthday. At the after-party, two strippers dressed as cops wheeled out a cake iced with a perfect rendition of Guernica. On a nearby table lay photographs of Shafrazi being led from MoMA in handcuffs. Brown climbed onto a table, handed him a tube of red icing, and shouted: “Write, Tony! Write!” At first Shafrazi traced the words “I AM SORRY.” The room went quiet. Then, with a pause that seemed to stretch forever, he added another: “NOT!”

When I asked what it was like to be showing with Shafrazi again, Zadikian paused, then said, “It’s very strange to be reliving the past.”