August 4 1931

Yes, today is Tony's birthday. born August 4th, 1931 in Chicago. He is still missed by many, thanks to this blog some old friends contact me and tell their stories, share their memories.
 These two painting are in Sharon's house, in Chloride,Arizona: a tear running down a cheek and a rusted pan with with some harlequins. Tony sometimes just needed to paint and then what ever material he found he would paint on it. I am glad these works are still around.

This piece was discovered on the internet by Jim VL, a dear friend who still cares about Tony's work. The caption underneath is from the seller. As far as I can tell it is accurate. Thanks Jim.

This is a gorgeous modernist work by well known contemporary artist (and personality) Tony Mafia (1931-1999); recently recovered from a Los Angeles estate. Fine  art galleries sell pieces by Tony Mafia for several thousands of dollars but this fantastic work is being offered at far below what you would find in any gallery. Tony Mafia's works are known the world over. He lived in Los Angeles, Tijuana, Mexico, Antwerp, Belgium, etc - and counted numerous celebrities and notables among his collectors and friends. Paintings of his hang in fine museums throughout the world, including: The Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Chicago Art Institute; Museum of Mexico City; Boston Museum of Modern Art, etc. Please read below for specifics regarding this piece.  

Whisky-A-Go-Go

Gia wrote: Hi Tumbleweed - I am in possession of three Tony Mafia pics from my parents who owned the Whisky-A-Go-Go in the 60's. How can I find out about these paintings? Thanks.
That was the question I was asked so I asked a friend who was there when it all happened.Dale's answer: On the corner of Sunset Blvd. & Doheny Dr. near the west end of the fabled Sunset Strip, up until 1962, there was a Music Conservatory, where folks went to learn and practice dance, music, the physical arts. A fellow named Bill Gilbert bought it, 'cause he had an idea to start a nightclub which would attract neat young ladies after work, where he would give them a 'club' where they could freshen-up, come down a flight of stairs into a nightclub, making whatever kind of an 'entrance' they liked, and be served a free drink and snack food. His idea was, 'Where the chicks are, the guys will follow'. Great concept, but for a lot of reasons it didn't fly. Meanwhile, the disco rage was going in the east, with pole-dance-type chicks gyrating in cages, so Elmer Valentine, who owned and ran the Interlude, a club on the Strip upstairs from another famous LA nightspot, the Trocadero, joined with Phil Terrazini, who owned and ran the Losers, a hot spot on La Cienega Blvd just a block down from the Strip, and they bought the failed Party (Bill Gilbert's failed club), and turned it into the Whiskey a Go-Go (known as just 'The Whiskey').

While it was the Party. Bill had hired (used?) Tony to decorate and do paintings for the club, and I don't remember why, but one day while it was just being started to be built, I wandered in, and somehow got inveigled into doing the sound system for the place. Tony and I hit it off, and one day we got to feeling pretty good, and he was looking at my almost new '61 T-Bird convertible, and asked me if I'd like my car painted. I said. 'Are you nuts?!' The paint is perfect.  (It was a medium to light blue). He said, 'No, I mean I'll paint it'. At that time, you could still buy lacquer paints, so we went to an auto supply store, and Tony picked out about six or eight different colors (Blue, White, Green, Red, Yellow, etc.) of half-pint cans of lacquer. Then we spent the afternoon up in the upper back parking lot of what is now the Whiskey (Which was designed as where the chicks would come into the Party women's club house), and Tony painted ladies, dancing girls, horses, flowers all down both sides of my 'Bird. This was way before kids were putting daisies and doing wild paintings on vans (except, maybe, for Ken Kesey), and the car attracted a lot of attention. In fact, the first time we took it across the border, it was as if we were leading a parade down the main street of Tijuana. Back to the Whiskey: The opening act was (damn, I can see him in my mind, and hear him, but can't remember his name. A little guy, but he could sing, had several top hits, you can probably look him up), and the crowd was great, Girls were dancing in cages suspended from the ceiling, the music was rocking. guys were picking up chicks in multiples to go somewhere and ball, chicks were picking up chicks and couples, and vice versa, it was a swinging place, long before the NY scene. Funny vignette, a couple of guys I knew from Hewlett-Packard were just developing the very first home TV tape-recorder/cameras, and gave me a demo to take to the opening, which was in the after noon, and I set the camera up on the balcony overlooking the front entrance and stage (Which at that time was right in the front corner of the building, exactly on the corner of Sunset and Doheny.) A lot of Hollywood type s came to the Party with their chicks and assorted ladies, and after a while, when they noticed the camera, a bunch of them went bananas and threatened to 'Burn this F***ing place down if you don't get rid of that camera and destroy the tape'. Everyone loved Tony's paintings, and I'm pretty sure that when Gilbert sold the place to the Whiskey, he sold a few of those works, and I doubt Tony saw any of the money. At that time, Tony had an apartment above a drug store on Santa Monica Blvd, just a few blocks east of Doheny, so he could easily walk, not only to the Party/Whiskey, but also to Doug Weston's Fabled folk-music club* which was right adjacent to the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Doheny Dr. where Tony was Master of Ceremonies for the Monday night Hootnannies, where folks like Judy Collins, the Smother Brothers, and Joan Baez, et.al, used to perform when they weren't out on the road. Good times, Thanks for bringing back the memories. Tony was poor (financially, as usual) but you did not have to feel sorry for him. One morning I came in from Vegas, and picked up a couple of bags to food to take to Tony at that Santa Monica Blvd. apartment. He usually left the place open, and I knew where he 'hid' the key, so after I knocked and he didn't answer, I walked in and started putting stuff in the fridge and cupboards. 'Hey, what's up', I heard, and turned around to see Tony's head above the back of the couch. 'Just bringing you some breakfast and other stuff', I said'.  'Cool', he said, and 'Meet Darla', as a beautiful lady's head rose up next to his from the couch. 'I know her', I answered, for in the sack with Tony, gratis I'm sure, was the most expensive hooker in Las Vegas, at the time.
* the Troubadour.

For questions about the paintings, you need to send a picture of them and we'll figure out what we can tell you about it. Post a comment with your e-mail, I reply.

Rain/Reign

It is a dark, rainy day in spring. In this flat country there are many rainy days. It changes the colors. Everything drips,all is watery. But even then there the bright red outline who reigns over the painting. There are the the far desert vistas and at least three gentle landscapes. This non linear but layered painting jumps between the different realities, different emotions. The thick cutout lines every time again isolate a separate reality, the other meaning, the other 'signifié'. The reading of Tony Mafia's painting remains open to the reader. he was a forceful man, but not an authoritarian painter. The painting was shown in Leohards Gallery

The Art Critic

Tony Mafia didn’t like to talk about his work in a theoretical way. He also was not good at it. He disliked art critics and even more art journalists. In interviews almost all journalists preferred to talk about the man rather than about his work. They liked his work all right but were intrigued by the persona. Yet Tony often said not to put a too fine point on it: ”My work is better than I am. I just the asshole you know.” So it was through at lack of savvy, or a predilection of the person he spoke too that the narrative of Tony’s life was typified and framed as the life of the restless artist, from rags to riches and back again in no time, honest is his drive and work. Tony didn’t speak the language of critical discourse and didn’t have the words to explain why he did what he did. When, however, friends or strangers came to the house or gas station he would give a guided tour by all the work, showing the different elements, the composition, which always came from his hand and heart. He would point out colors and combinations of colors and how they work. Tony had a sense of the greatness of his work but felt he didn’t fit in the tradition of contemporary art although he considered himself part of that evolution. He was a cult painter for a small group of followers who collected and loved his work. Some viewers are troubled because they cannot discern the meaning nor the why of a painting, at least not rationally. With the heart, with feeling they would learn how to look at his work over time. With some this leads to frustration, with others to lifelong love.

One of the aspects I appreciate in TM’s work are the manifold openings into the layers of possible meanings. That way each person discovers a different painting. Yet one element almost always returns: Tony will give the viewers an opening, an escape route out of the painting, a place to rest, a silence in which to gather oneself. He is not an authoritarian painter imposing only one possible view of his work. Tony did not really plan out a painting by doing sketches or such. With one color of oil he might start out to map a canvas, yet nothing said he would follow the road on which he started out. When a piece of work became too decorative he did something to make it harder for himself and tried to do a really good painting. He was driven. Many of his old friends have testified to the fact that he needed to paint, that when he had no paper or canvas he would paint on anything: an old fence pulled out of the ground in the rain, tarps, doors, the wooden lid of a flour bin from a burned out Jewish bakery … Whatever he could lay his brush on and paint out the darkness of his soul on.

Being an outsider with tons of charisma he didn’t know how to play the field, nor how to get into the big museums. That brought sadness because Tony craved immortality for his work. He was a very visual man, but we should also remember him as a musician playing folk rock, blues, flamenco, blue grass on guitars, banjos and harmonicas. Everything he did had a rough edge, sometimes a feel of something unfinished, sometimes of a chaos that he tried to make sense of. I have work the size of a stamp and huge canvasses. He himself considered the way he dealt with composition and color as being abstract although in most of his work you will find human beings. Of most of his later work I know the history and so the canvasses become the theater on which he played out his life, sometimes our life, sometimes touching on the sacred or the secret of life and death.

Often, I would hear Tony play the guitar to his paintings. To him his best work was alive, said more than what he consciously had put in them. With Tony Mafia painting was knowledge of technique, experience and heart, a life hard lived that is condensed in his fast and intuitive brush strokes. Yes you will recognize Tony by his brush strokes.

The painting was in three shows.

The artist

In this picture taken in Montellano, Spain, Tony is looking at a master guitar builder making his guitar. Tony loved all the arts and was good in several of them. In May this year 10 years will have passed since his demise. A Dutch poet Hannie Rouweler took the initiative to compose a Tribute to Tony. She asked five Dutch and five Flemish poets to write a poem inspired by Tony's work, or as the case may be by Tony himself. On the link you can click and then you'll see the front and back cover and you can read a series of comments on the different poems written for this publication. Also you can order the book or download it through that website. Obviously it is a bilingual publication with a beautiful lay out and great and thoughtful poetry. I thank Hannie for the initiative, John Irons for the help with the English translations and all the poets for their honest and thoughtful, beautiful poems.

The peasant couple reveling in the foreground contrasting the elegance of the two dancers in the background: this could be a painting about the clash of harsh reality and art, about expectations and dreams, about love, lust and tenderness. Tony Mafia also could have just met them on the cobblestoned streets in Antwerp in 1999, came home and painted what he felt and saw. Note the abstract paintings in the background, the meeting could have been in a gallery and the art critic took the lady home...

Horse

Although politically outspoken and a card carrying democrat, Tony couldn't be squared away in one or another political or stylistic direction. He was neither left nor right, he was catholic, needed a god but didn't think there was one, and stylistically he couldn't care less about directions in contemporary style. If he cared just a bit about something, then it was to bend the rules. I think in many instances he stayed close to the iconography as one finds in the Indian petroglyphs and on the ledgers of Plains Indians. He would always try to capture the soul, rather than the faithful 'realistic' image. Just as he did in this horse.

Technique

I visited an overview of the work of Jan Cox. I learned a lot. The show was well put together, and looking at the work I saw why Tony Mafia liked the man and his work. Their way of handling paint, loading the brush is similar. The strange distorted yet often pretty figures, the outlines, sometimes the composition of a canvas shows that these painters are kindred spirits. They were both tormented artists suffering of depression. This whimsical drawing is Dress in Blue.

Lines

On the same theme of nudeness: this 1985 piece is called Lines for obvious reasons, horizontal and vertical lines. The figures are there but they are near abstractions. Spooky on the post 'Romance' noted that the composition of that particular drawing was close to a Rubens painting 'Suzanna and the elders'.
Tony knew Rubens' work since he visited his house in Antwerp, the churches where his work was and the museums. He applied the broad brush technique Rubens used and I guess that good compositions are of all times. Yet Tony did what he wanted to do so you have had a series of nudes from the pencil pusher to this light one, so you could see the wide range and differences in how Tony treated a theme.

The art critic

I wrote before that Tony didn't cherish art critics. Here the art critic is shown as the emperor without clothes contemplating paintings in a gallery, signed Tony Mafia. In the later period of his painting and life he often painted paintings in a painting. I knew he usually like big canvasses. So I asked one day why he did this kind of cutting up of the space he had at his disposal. His answer was: I won't have time to paint them all. I guess he thought them too intellectual, too much part of creating the establishment, not really being creative but judgmental. I like the strange forced perspective, the painted sculptings and the flat and three dimentional figure. I would call this a humorist's painting, a naughty child's superior prank.

Respect

Fred Bervoets, a painter whom Tony respected and who respected Tony’s work, has an exhibition called ‘Welcome Home’. Their work has many points in common: the crowdedness, the difficulty in describing the style or direction. One description goes for both Tony and Fred: a narrative expressionist. Also both do a lot of self-portraits and to be honest, most of their works are autobiographical. You’ll find pain, despair, love and sex, art critics and the icons of friends and family. The main difference is their use of color. Fred goes mainly into dark somber tones while Tony uses the whole rainbow like in this mixed medium oil and pastel on paper from 1996. Here he also mixes his Indian heritage with his love of all things Spanish and his life in Mexico with the Matadora…

Painting in the street

Tony, while being in the air force, was stationed in Southern Germany. On one of his leaves he went to Paris. This was the early fifties and of course he always carried his paints and brushes. He ended up setting up shop on the banks of Seine. He liked to paint with an audience which didn't intimidate him at all. He either ignored them or danced in front of the canvas, doing a little show to entertain them. I don't know what, nor how he painted that day. Along comes a well dressed, rotund gentleman, who watches him for quite a while and a group of onlookers grows. Hear them whisper in French, hear a solemn silence and Tony probably joking in English, or commenting. When the gentleman with cane, goes his way, he turns to Tony and says: If you keep painting you could become a master. The group applauds and then some one asks: 'Do you know whom that was, that was Monsieur Henri Matisse!' He told me the stories several times, wondering why it mattered to him...
I think if you look at Matisse's work that you can see the way the both handled color and were free in the representation of their subject, without being abstract. This Crucifiction is in Harry Kegels' office, a friend and collector of Tony's work. The drawing was shown at Lineart 1998 in Ghent.

Mohave Museum of History and Arts

The Rainbow of the Kachina was painted in Chloride in 1998. A few years later I donated it to the Mohave Museum of History and Arts.
Admittedly the museum is more about the early aboriginal inhabitants of the area, the ranchers and miners and the railroad than about art. Yet it has two paintings of Tony Mafia: one loose sketch and the painting hanging in the directors office. Shannon Rossiter always had his door open and has the brochures and information about Tony, so visitors are welcome to sit down and listen and talk about Tony's art. I felt it was important for Tony's work to be somewhere in his chosen region, seen in the public domain.

Murals

One of the reasons Tony Mafia was a bit disenchanted with Chloride is that a large mural hab been painted over in the 'Tennessee Social Club and Saloon" in 1990. Many have spoken to me about the loss they still feel about this. Luckily a few other murals are still around. If you take a room at the Shep's Miners Inn (part of the Yesterdays Restaurant) then you can can ask for one of the two Tony Mafia rooms, mentioned in 'dessert currents' issue of June 2007 in an interview. Somewhere around 1988 he stayed a couple of days there when 'Linda' still had the place. He took his paint and left his mark. He liked Chloride because it was the West, a real old Wild West town. When I arrived here first in 1991 there were still many artist living in the small community: 307, they said, when you two are home. There were some other painters, potters and two writers beside myself. Tony despaired about the people taking classes and all doing the same old pot and the same quail... There were a lot of musicians around too but since he played according to his own inner rhythms, he seldom jammed with them.

Fishing

Chloride and the gasstation. Tony would love it and it made him despair. He felt good and at home and totally lonesome. He had friends, some loved his work, some loved his music, but he didn’t feel his work was understood. If it would get too much we would go fishing: in Willow Beach, Lake Mead, the South Cove, Echo Canyon (fly fishing) and Eagle Lake in Nevada where he caught some impressive brownies, Katherine’s Landing, along the Colorado in Laughlin behind the casino’s and at the end of Diamond Creek Road on the Hualapai Reservation, 22 miles of rough washboard road but with an immense beauty would surrounding him. He never caught anything there, not even had a nibble, but he would bullshit with a few of the guys there. Bij the way, Tony's picture is taken right there after fishing at the end of Diamond Creek Road. He would do sketches. One of them is in the Kingman Museum of History and Art. All that is in the painting Indian Sun shown and sold in December 1998 In Lineart Ghent, Belgium.

Diamond Creek Road♣

The intimate majesty of playing shade
on a curved wall
encompasses all

The wisdom of waiting for water
the strength of storms and stones
the beauty of belonging
and then
there is the shadow of the gods
and the fading of the light
when the windfull wings fold
and fall

Nudes

Of course Tony Mafia has done many nudes and erotic paintings and drawings. Many female figures wear red stockings, an age old symbol of ripe sexuality. In the period of his life that he sold his drawings in the café’s and brothels of the world, he painted many a “Lady of the way’s in repose’. These drawings and paintings are often tender and soft, sometimes explicitly sexual, but never vulgar or pornographic. In Nudes in the Gallery he combines paintings in paintings with nudes. In Antwerp in the late sixties, the seventies and eighties he would sell many of his drawings in the café's in the red light district. The girls would entice their Johns to buy them a watercolor or buy one for their wife. While living in Paris early sixties he would sell in the red light district near Les Halles. La Coupole, Café Flore, Saint Germain des Prés, he sold in all of these world famous places. In Café Méditerané James Mason bought a drawing for himself and one for Audrey Hepburn because her husband would not get her one...

Mexican and Spanish Paintings

The five O'clock Sun, when in the arena the bloods drips from the sword and the bull is slain...
Tony Mafia has often stayed for longer periods in Spain and Mexico. He worked for instance during six month in Casares, near Malaga in Spain. There he painted a whole exhibit in 1964, which sold out completely upon showing in Paris in Madame Besnard's Gallery. We met her in probably 1997, confirming all Tony's story about that period of his life, this was my impression of that meeting:

All is changed
nothing stays the same
but the street
on which the changing
walk until words
of past
hurt
for lack of a tomorrow

The fading star
of laughter lost
hears but the
murmur of memory
on rue St André des Arts
meeting Madame
Françoise Besnard

The small white village of Casares, with its bizarre soul surfaces now and then again as in “The lady with the goat”. Furthermore he knows bullfighting, Flamenco (he plays a mean guitar), the gypsies and the dance from the inside, the rendering of which are consequently never trivial, superficial or touristy. In these themes we once again find the freedom of expression that is given by “the costume”: the traje de luz of the bullfighters, knowing full well that the picador is important and that the toreador and matador wouldn’t stand a chance without him. He really lived the bullfights because he 'went' as a young man with I seem to remember Betty Ford, a lady matador and toured parts of Mexico with her... Guitars, peasants and multiple warm-blooded women are depicted, but also the thread of Death. To counter this, very often life is painted in full and robust color.


Of course Don Quixote and Dulcinea have to be there as well.

Native American Paintings

Admire The Trail of Tears, all the icons are there : the freezing snow, the people suffering, but also hope and protection, confidence that the people survive. Note the Black Sun, a signature referring to his Indian Name.
Being Indian inspired an important part of Tony Mafia’s work. I use Indian since he didn’t like political correct speak. His father was Onondaga Cherokee. So he paints, hunting scenes, legends of different tribes and regions. He gets angry when in Canada a Six hundred years old sacred golden spruce if felled one night, just for fun. Thus he paints “The tree” and “The sentinel” in which a magical landscape is guarded by the sentinel raising from the rock. As mentioned before sometimes the Indian symbolism is mixed in with the self-portraits as these elements are mixed in his person. Except for subject matter, these paintings have nothing in common with “South Western Art” which leans dangerously close to kitsch: worn clichés and situations that can be recognized and understood in one look. In contrast, in Tony’s work it are the elements of form and color that touch you and only in further viewing the icons can be recognized and deciphered and the magic of colors is let loose in a “story”.


A Navajo with hawk at the moment of taking flight

Circus and harlequins

In Traveling Circus a trapeze artist is trying to find her balance, while HE is sitting quietly looking away, letting her hang out to dry... On the ladder doomingly dark near demonic figures climb up and up. An allegory of our world? The circus, clowns and harlequins are grateful subjects. They have strange and wonderful costumes and can express a range of emotions, from the intimate to the grotesque and the subject allows an explosion of exhilarating colors... often you'll find these people wandering in magical-mythical landscapes.



In Appled , where he combines image and words, he shows us how tenderness and happiness can be right under our nose and we still don't see it.