The Wild Life and Times of Tony Shafrazi

This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol. 7. To see the full story, purchase your copy of the magazine here.

 

Talking to the art dealer Tony Shafrazi is like dancing with a dervish. It’s dizzying enough to induce a trance. “Not a dealer!” he shouts, breaking it. “I’m a gallerist.”

That distinction matters to Shafrazi. But gallerist is too small a word to convey his passion for art or the depth of knowledge he brings to it, whether he is selling it, making it, showing it, thinking and talking about it, or living it. Romantic may be a better description for a man who is willing to empty his pockets to present the work of artists he admires in a grandly scaled context, no matter the cost.

“I can’t help it,” he admits. “That’s what I do.”

Indeed, over the last 45 years, Shafrazi may have spent as much on exhibitions, publications, and gallery spaces as he has made selling Andy Warhols, Jean-Michel Basquiats, Keith Harings, and Francis Bacons.

“I think maybe he wasn’t as interested in getting rich as in making people happy,” observes Earle I. Mack, an arts patron and former ambassador to Finland who has seen the peripatetic Shafrazi “everywhere” for decades. According to Annie Plumb, a private dealer who got her start in the early 1980s by working for Shafrazi, “Tony is no shark of a businessperson. He’s known in the trade for his honesty, and for selling at low commission. He feels a responsibility to the culture and the evolution of art’s role in the world.”

The man Shafrazi considers his closest friend, Peter M. Brant, the prominent collector and breeder of thoroughbreds, echoes these sentiments: “Tony is not out for the last cent. He has a bigger agenda.” This includes building superior private collections, publishing ambitious, well-researched catalogues, and maintaining the curatorial role he has performed for the Brant family’s art foundation since its inception 29 years ago. (His recent survey of paintings by Kenny Scharf at the Brant Foundation’s New York branch, in the East Village, was possibly the artist’s best.)

The wedges of white hair above his ears and perpetually gesticulating hands make it easy to spot the eighty-something Shafrazi in a crowd. (He’s coy about his age.) Given to excited outbursts and tales so epic that even their narrator compares them to the Arabian Nights, he may strike the uninitiated as a cherubic buffoon who does not know when to stop connecting dots. To Gavin Brown, a partner at the blue-chip Gladstone Gallery, “Tony was a slightly ridiculous figure until we got to know each other. When you unglaze your eyes and start listening to his stream of consciousness, he has great insight into art and life and the mystery of it all.”

That dedication, lack of guile, and sometimes hapless compulsion to always go the limit has endeared him to three generations of artists, dealers, writers, and collectors, winning him devotees in Hollywood and the music business as well. I understood why after three hours-long interviews over the telephone and in person at Casa Cipriani, Shafrazi’s current address in Manhattan since making a stealth move to Palm Beach during the pandemic. His intensely digressive, rapid-fire manner of speaking is hard to follow, and frustrating to parse, but rewards patience by delivering a fascinating, poignant, and ultimately breathtaking account of his life that would be hard to believe if it were not all veriably true.

“I never lie,” he declares, stringing together a torrent of stories about his childhood in Iran, his schooling in England, hitchhiking through Europe as a teenager, his worship of James Dean, and his introduction to Warhol on the first day of his virgin trip to New York, in 1965, dressed in a coppery gold mohair suit. “All gold,” he notes, without irony, “would be too gauche.”

Shafrazi has earned a reputation as the art world’s own Zelig through a combination of chutzpah and happenstance, reinventing himself time and again. Starting out as a sculptor in London, he emigrated to New York in 1969 and in subsequent years opened, lost, rebuilt, closed, and reimagined his namesake gallery while consistently attracting the company of storied figures in art, entertainment, and politics.

His first American friend was Dennis Hopper, whom he met in 1963 and whose photographs he later exhibited. The second was Ed Ruscha. He speaks to the art collector and jeweler Laurence Graff a few times a day. Leonardo DiCaprio and Owen Wilson also have his phone number. In 1995, he appeared in Azzedine Alaïa’s Paris atelier as Best Man for Brant’s wedding to Stephanie Seymour. Once, long ago, Shafrazi sat at a piano bench beside Fats Domino for a concert the R&B star gave in London. On another occasion, he flew to the US Open with Donald Trump. (The President was never a client. “We’ve met a few times since 1979,” Shafrazi recalls. “At parties.”)

Shafrazi himself has been tabloid fodder since 1974, when he spray painted the blood-red words “Kill Lies All” on Pablo Picasso’s black-and-white “Guernica” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He told police that defacing what many consider the 20th century’s most powerful depiction of the horrors of war was a premeditated act of conscience to protest the war in Vietnam. He has yet to live it down. “It never leaves me,” he sighs. A week after tagging the painting, for which he was sentenced to five years’ probation, Shafrazi was having lunch in a SoHo restaurant when a group of women approached from another table. “They were the museum’s conservators,” he recalled. “One had been on the front page of the New York Times, cleaning the thing. And suddenly they are smiling and asking for my autograph!”

Shafrazi was born in 1943 to Armenian Christians in Abadan, an island city in central Iran that serves a major oil refinery. After his parents’ divorce, when he was three, Shafrazi lost track of his mother and spent many a solitary afternoon watching Hollywood films in Cinema Rex, “the most beautiful movie theater in the world.” When he was eight, his mother reappeared with an embroidered suit that he remembers as vividly as the road trip he took with her, two years later, to meet his aunts and cousins for the first time. “I didn’t have any women around when I was younger,” he says. “And here were seven! It was unusual.”

Shafrazi’s father remarried, had two more children, and moved the family to Tehran. When his oldest son was 13, they traveled on the Orient Express and dropped him at an English school in Bilston, near Oxford, in the care of the village vicar. The young boy cried himself to sleep. He was cold for the first time in his life. He didn’t speak the language. Other foreign students had parents who visited. Shafrazi’s never did.

Gradually his discomfort subsided, and he learned to draw. He sculpted a head out of clay. An encouraging art teacher showed him how to cast it in bronze and facilitated his admission to the Hammersmith College of Art and Building in West London. It was the ’60s, and Shafrazi thrilled to it—the art, the music, the fashion. He met the celebrity photographer David Bailey. He had girlfriends. As he recalls, “I was madly in love with Prudence Pratt, a top model in London.” By 1965 he had enough confidence to visit his mother, who was living in California. His first stop was New York.

On the advice of a girlfriend in London, he checked into a midtown YMCA and glanced out the window to see a loft he recognized from pictures as Warhol’s first studio, the Silver Factory. Minutes later, he was stepping off its elevator.

“Andy was walking toward me in high heels, the Cuban heels that everyone in London wore for a few years. He could barely walk. And I hear, ‘Oh gee, who do we have here?’ I just came out from London. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ I said, ‘Yes, please. Maybe a little roll with a slice of salami and tomato, no butter. And a Coca-Cola.’ Meanwhile, music is playing, and the silver is not done well. Tin foil on the ceiling, partly sprayed, is coming off. The floor is silver. And because the loft was on the north side of the street, you have shafts of light at 12 o’clock or 12:15 coming straight into the floor and bouncing off. I saw a flower painting and an Elvis painting for the first time.”

The Pope of Pop put Shafrazi to work on the silver helium “pillows” that he was making for a show at Leo Castelli, the leading art dealer of the day. “He didn’t know how to weld the plastic nipple of the pillow. I did it in one shot, in my mohair suit, and stayed on for 10, 11 days.”

The Factory had a pay phone. That first afternoon, Shafrazi used it to call an unidentified number that his girlfriend had slipped into his pocket. To Warhol’s amazement, Roy Lichtenstein answered. He invited Shafrazi to lunch the following day. Afterward, the artist took him to meet Castelli, who in turn introduced him to Richard Serra. “We became like brothers,” Shafrazi recalls. Serra took him to an experimental space in SoHo, where he met Robert Smithson, the land artist whose “Spiral Jetty” in Utah is now on the National Register of Historic Places. After Shafrazi’s second trip to New York, in 1967, they too developed a close friendship.

Back in London, Shafrazi worked toward a graduate degree in sculpture at the Royal College of Art, often mingling with the celebrities and aristos flocking to the star-making Robert Fraser Gallery. In 1969, Fraser signed him for his first solo exhibition. The dealer missed his opening. Shafrazi found out why from banner headlines; Fraser had been arrested alongside Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for drug possession and was in jail.

With a resident visa in his pocket, Shafrazi packed up and moved permanently to New York. He took two teaching jobs and by 1972 was a regular presence at a front table at Max’s Kansas City reserved for Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Smithson, and other heavyweights who were fond of him; he doesn’t know why. “LeWitt was the main guy. Andre called him our Spinoza, because Sol wrote the Bible of conceptual art. For some reason, he liked me a lot. Andre, also. The look, or the energy, whatever it was,” he guesses.

In the summer of 1973, Shafrazi was in New Mexico to give a talk to students, when Smithson asked for an introduction to the Texas oilman Stanley Marsh, whom Shafrazi somehow knew and was planning to visit. Marsh owned an enormous ranch in Amarillo, and agreed to fund a new earthwork that Smithson hoped to construct on his property. Marsh arranged a small plane for Smithson and Shafrazi to scout sites from the air, but Shafrazi was on the ground with Smithson’s artist wife, Nancy Holt, when his friend took a second flight.

Horrifically, the plane crashed, killing the pilot, a photographer, and the 35-year-old artist. Shafrazi recalls, “He died at my feet. I helped bring the body home.” With Holt, Serra, and Zadik Zadikian, a refugee from Soviet Armenia who was Serra’s assistant, Shafrazi returned to spend 45 rather heroic days draining a lake, bulldozing earth, and moving stones to complete Smithson’s final work (“Amarillo Ramp”) from his drawings.

The idea of operating a gallery was a pipe dream in 1976, when Shafrazi heard that the Iranian empress and wife of the last Shah of Iran, Farah Diba Pahlavi, was adding a museum of contemporary art to her cultural program in Tehran. Who better to help fill it with art than Shafrazi? He volunteered. Partnering with Castelli and 14 other New York dealers, in seven trips to Iran he sold a cache of high-value paintings to the empress’s cousin, Kamran Diba, the museum’s first director, but took no commission for himself. “I didn’t know about putting money on top,” Shafrazi says. “I didn’t even ask for a drink of water.” (The experience paid off years later, when the exiled Diba became an enthusiastic client.)

Two years later, after building this cultural bridge, Shafrazi went back to Tehran and opened his first gallery to show a single, spectacular sculpture of a thousand evenly stacked, gold-leafed mud bricks by Zadikian. While there, Shafrazi’s beloved Cinema Rex burned to the ground in a fire set by four Islamists after an American-backed coup that had taken down a nationalist prime minister. The deadly fire precipitated what Shafrazi still disparages as “the so-called Iranian Revolution.”

As luck would have it, Zadikian’s show opened on the day the Shah declared martial law. Tanks rolled into the streets. Helicopters flew overhead. Fires were everywhere. Shafrazi left for New York shortly after the Pahlavis fled. Revolutionaries looted every gold brick in the show. All that remained was a single black-and-white photograph from the sparsely attended opening. Undeterred, Shafrazi decided to transform his apartment into a gallery with the help of Warhol’s friend, the architect Peter Marino. It opened in 1979 with new work by Zadikian, followed by a full season of shows by established post-minimalists and rising conceptualists. The artists sang his praises; openings were jammed.

An art school student working in the gallery as an installer invited Shafrazi to see a self-produced show of his drawings. He was Keith Haring. What happened next changed both of their lives.