Tony Shafrazi is the owner of the Shafrazi Art Gallery in New York, who deals artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle.
On February 28, 1974, Shafrazi spray-painted Picasso's painting Guernica, which hung in the Museum of Modern Art, with the words "KILL LIES ALL". The paint was easily removed as the painting was heavily varnished. It is believed that Shafrazi was protesting the announcement, the day before, of the release on bail of U.S. lieutenant William Calley. Calley, then under house arrest following his conviction, in 1971, for his part in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, had petitioned for habeas corpus; he had initially been sentenced to life imprisonment. Although his appeal was overturned in June, he was finally released from U.S. Army custody later in the year after having received a limited pardon from Richard Nixon. 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.
In an odd turn of events, only a few years later Shafrazi would be the art adviser to the Shah of Iran and his Peacock Throne. 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. The gallery was only open briefly, closing because of conditions in the country leading up to the 1979 Revolution.
In regard to his 1974 vandalism of the painting, he gave the following statement to 'Art in America' in December 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."