Tony Shafrazi

NEW YORK—Longtime New York art dealer Tony Shafrazi has developed a reputation for having, arguably, the most beautiful gallery in Chelsea, but sit down with him for a few minutes’ conversation and he also turns out to be an erudite and entertaining raconteur with a fascinating life story.

Born in Iran in 1944, Shafrazi attended boarding school in England, followed by a stint at art school and, eventually, the Royal College of Art in London. There, he was a contemporary and friend of the English Pop artists during the swinging ’60s and claims to have established the first loft-style studio in London.

By the early 1970s he was working as an artist in New York City, where he became one of the most visible politicized artists to oppose the Vietnam War, going so far as to mount a guerilla art protest at MoMA in 1974, in which he spray-painted the words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s Guernica. Just a few years later, in another twist, he helped establish the remarkable art collection purchased by the Iranian Royal family.

But it was probably in the early 1980s that the Tony Shafrazi who is most familiar nowadays appeared on the scene, running a gallery in Soho that helped launch the careers of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others.

More recently, Shafrazi has edited Andy Warhol Portraits (Phaidon), which derives from his gallery’s major 2005 exhibition. In discussing the book with ArtInfo, he explains how Warhol was the key individual in American art during the years that he has experienced it and the way in which art has become serious business.

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Tony, you were one of Warhol’s great friends, but what your new book makes plain is that you were a great admirer as well.

I worshipped the guy. It wasn’t until at least 10 years after he died—until about ’96 or ’97—that it began to be mentioned in very small circles that Andy Warhol was possibly one of the most important artists that America had produced. The majority of people were very suspect of that idea and a lot of people were very critical of that idea. I don’t think anyone ever claimed then that he might be considered “the” American artist, but I felt that and I wrote that. I wrote my graduate thesis for the Royal College of Art between 1965 and 1967 and I’d already said it back then. I’d come all the way from England to see him in 1965. Of course, many critics at that time and ever since have continued to resist the idea.

You’re particularly convinced that his portraits have been underestimated. How did those start?

This was something that occurred after Warhol was shot [in 1968]. He came back to painting around about 1970 and he began the portraits. That was when he was writing “art is business” for the first time. He was founding Interview magazine and expanding the films and the factory and moving it to a rather safer place, so that it wouldn’t be so open to strange or threatening people. Some of the people around Warhol treated it all as a business, and so the portraits—as planned and commissioned work—really started then. And because a number of them were of well-to-do people in the beginning, and because of Warhol’s light-hearted humor, they were thought of as “society portraiture,” or they picked up that sort of association.

But I suspect they were out of step with the cultural mood of the time, which was much darker.

The art world at that time was coming out of the exhaustion of the Vietnam War and its effect on the general culture. The preoccupations of so-called serious artists had shifted from celebrating pop culture to dealing with radical issues: minimal art, conceptual art, language art, video and performance and body art, and even land art. All of these other things came in and art shifted away from any kind of ornamentation or beautification, let alone a celebratory pop culture language of beauty or sexuality.

So painting per se, particularly colorful painting and social painting, with an interest in people, was definitely out. That lasted all the way until the late ’70s as an artistic and social phenomenon, when people went back to color—out of necessity, really. They started wearing Hawaiian shirts rather than army fatigues, and then an extraordinary period of celebration started in the clubs. From clubs like Hurrah uptown and Studio 54 and Xenon and all the gigantic disco clubs, to the downtown, underground art world clubs like The Mudd Club and Area.