Tony Shafrazi

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In 1974, the young Iranian artist Tony Shafrazi spray-painted the words "KILL LIES ALL" onto Pablo Picasso's Guernica, then installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as a protest against U.S. actions in My Lai. The Guerrilla Art Action Group came to the defense of Shafrazi, arguing that he was completing, not vandalizing, Picasso's creation.

In an odd turn of events, only a few years later Shafrazi would be the art adviser to the Peacock Throne. At this time the Shah of Iran was one of the wealthiest men on the planet. Shafrazi began to assemble a 20th century art collection on the Shah's behalf. As he did so his power expanded into the art market. In Tehran he built a museum to house this collection. The Museum Shafrazi had constructed epitomized the Shah's modern Iranian state, the collection was therefore essentially Western: from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Conceptual Art.

In 1978, Shafrazi opened his own commercial gallery in a small Tehran shopfront.

In the 1980's Shafrazi went on to run one of the most successful galleries in New York, championing graffiti artists such as Keith Haring.

In regard to his 1974 attack on Guernica, he gave the following statement to Art in America in December of 1980:

“

I wanted to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life. Maybe that's why the Guernica action remains so difficult to deal with. I tried to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross; I wanted to dwell within the act of the painting's creation, get involved with the making of the work, put my hand within it and by that act encourage the individual viewer to challenge it, deal with it and thus see it in its dynamic raw state as it was being made, not as a piece of history.

”