Tony Shafrazi was born on May 8,1943 and is an American art dealer, gallery owner, and artist.
19 Facts About Tony Shafrazi
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Tony Shafrazi is the owner of the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City who deals in artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle.
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Tony Shafrazi's parents divorced when he was two years old.
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Tony Shafrazi attended the Royal College of Art from 1963 to 1967.
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Tony Shafrazi moved to New York City in 1969, where he lectured at several universities, including the School of Visual Arts.
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On February 28,1974, Tony Shafrazi spray-painted Picasso's 1937 painting Guernica, which hung in the Museum of Modern Art, with the words "KILL LIES ALL" in foot-high letters.
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Tony Shafrazi deliberately wrote the confusing phrase, "KILL LIES ALL" instead of "ALL LIES KILL", as an allusion to James Joyce's 1939 novel, Finnegans Wake, so that it could be read from any direction.
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Tony 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.
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Tony Shafrazi was later given five years' probation, without a trial.
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Tony Shafrazi dedicated his booth at Art Basel 2012 to his own artwork.
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In 1976, only a few years after the spray painting incident, Tony Shafrazi returned to his homeland and became the art advisor to the Shah of Iran and Kamran Diba, then director of the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art.
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The museum Tony Shafrazi had constructed in Tehran to house this collection epitomized the Shah's modern Iranian state, thus the collection was predominantly Western: from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Conceptual Art, including works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Willem de Kooning.
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In 1978, Tony Shafrazi briefly opened his own commercial gallery in a small Tehran shopfront but closed it because of conditions in the country leading up to the 1979 Revolution.
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Tony Shafrazi lost much of his art during that time but safely returned to New York City.
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Tony Shafrazi converted his rented apartment into a makeshift gallery where he slept on a small loft bed at night.
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Tony Shafrazi's clients have included Donald Trump and Larry Silverstein.
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In 1995, Stephanie Seymour and Peter Brant had Tony Shafrazi serve as the best man at their wedding at an estate outside Paris.
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Tony Shafrazi is actively involved in supporting Children of Armenia Fund, a charitable organization that aims to advance rural communities in Armenia.
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Tony Shafrazi is the Honorary Chair of COAF Honorary Board.