Thursday, June 5, 2014

Paintings Of Degrazia And Munch

By Darren Hartley


A lifelong appreciation of the native cultures in the Sonoran Desert was the DeGrazia paintings. Ettore, nicknamed Ted, met and married Alexandra, the daughter of Fox Theater owner Nicholas Diamos in 1936. Ted and Alexandria left an evening ballet performance in 1942 to head for the Palacio Municipal to see muralist Diego Rivera at work.

In 1944, Ted bought an acre of land at Prince Road and Campbell Avenue to build his first adobe studio. This was after Tucson galleries showed no interest in exhibiting DeGrazia paintings. It was in this studio where he met Marion Sheret and subsequently married her in the jungles of Mexico in 1947.

DeGrazia paintings became widely successful from 1960 to the mid 70s. Ted's gallery flourished with hundreds of thousands of yearly visitors. In 1976, a protestation against inheritance taxes on art works led Ted to haul 100 DeGrazia paintings on horseback and set them ablaze in the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix.

Munch paintings played a great role in German expressionism, as well as the art form that later followed. This role is attributed to the strong mental anguish that was displayed in many of the pieces Edvard Munch created. Part of the reason for the deeper tone Munch paintings took was due to the mental illness his father suffered.

The term given to the style of Munch paintings was Symbolism. They were expressions of a personal sense of art, instead of an external view. They were representations of the inward feelings and repressed emotions of Edvard. In short, what you get is not what you actually see, when it comes to Munch paintings.

Munch paintings depicted the darker side of art. Tones and shadows were used to depict the emotions the images were feelings, seemingly coming from the deep seating feelings Edvard tended to keep inside himself. This style of painting was considered to be a prelude to the German expressionistic movement, which came out with its own dark pieces.




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