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.  

No salesperson

This is little Indian panting done in Chloride for a good friend of Tony living there. The family takes good care of the work and takes pride in the work. Regularly, I am asked whether I can help with selling a painting or whether I know the venues. I am good at many things but I am definitly not a salesperson. I do not know the market situation in the US and in Europe I learned that a person will fall in love with a piece and will have to have it at any price. Those are extremely rare and far between. The others who 'like', 'adore', even 'admire' Tony's work want you to give it away for free. I spend money on keeping the collection in good shape and for moving paintings for occasional shows. I want the work to be seen and hence the blog. I am no help at selling Tony's work. I wish all of you good luck and let me know the result of your efforts. Tony was a contrarian, so he skillfully maneuvered himself out of the mainstream until he became a a cult figure for a select band of followers. He is among the great painters of last century but never was part of the established art scene.

Balle de Paris

Cheeta Jones wrote: My mom picked this painting up from a garage sale many years ago for two dollars. The garage sale was actually in Canada in southern Ontario. Yes , I have like the painting for a long time. I only began ton research Tony's work recently and seeing his other work has made me appreciate this painting even more. I like what you have done to create a collection of his paintings and stories...
Tumbleweed: This painting has the words Balle de Paris, probably he meant Belle de Paris seen the pretty ladies ready for a bal. It stems or refers to his Paris period in the sixties when he lived ina "chambre de bonne" after staying in Hôtel Belgique for a while. He roamed the streets, sold his work in the 'grand cafe's', knew the ladies from 'Les Halles' and the galleries in Rue St André des Arts:

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

Bullfight

In 1969 he did this charcoal drawing. He painted there for the gallery of Françoise Besnard. That was a few years after Tony Mafia had spend several months in Casares in Andalusia. His stay there has deeply influenced his later work. We revisited Casares in the late nineties and the town was eerie to say the least. Here the human protagonists of a bullfight is shown.

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.

October 1983

You find here two newspaper clippings and the price list from the 1983 exhibition in Gallery Atrium. He had a big sculpting there that was the focal point in Café De Linde on the South side of Antwerp. then the sculpting moved to a castle in Portugal. The paintings in that time were big, reaching to the floor, being installations, often with a book added... I don't remember what or if he sold. The revues at least were great, loving Tony Mafia and his work.

Tears and yellow jacket

In this oil painting , Tony never used acrylics, a few themes come together. First of all the gallery setting, thus having paintings in a painting. Furthermore, the female figure cries. Here just as in the Tearing skull the tears are well painted, almost as if to prove he could do the precise work. The painting is from 1999. Well, I had reasons to be sad and cry and yes I had a yellow jacket. From abstract sections to reality in one painting.

Out of step with the band

Tony and I felt usually out of step, out of sync with the two worlds we were living in. I think that Obama Barack's victory would have really pleased Tony Mafia. He was a democrat at heart and a member of the party and had been at the first march between Selma en Montgomery. He told me about the German shepherds chasing the people. I wonder what he would have painted about this feeling of relief. I am sure he would feel even more patiotic now. The painting from 1997 was shown in Leonhard's and Lineart in 1998.

The moonbathers

The moonbather is a 1998 large oilpaining, shown at Leonhard's Gallery in Antwerp. Enjoy the swirling night sky, the people on the beach and those in the water. See the embracing couple? See the banana moon? One of Tony's lighthearted works...

Gebo

In the spring of 1971 Tony Mafia had an exhibition in Gebo Gallery in Antwerp. The picture on the invitation was a larger canvas with a boy in the foreground. I read it as a Native American family contemplating the plain and the river. Lots of grays and blues.

Zandvoort

The drawing is on a monoprint, something Tony used to do in the late sixties and sometimes when he felt like it. The drawing is from 69 and the invitation from a show of almost a month in Holland in 68.

Going Dutch

These are two invitations from the period Tony mafia lived in Holland with his then family, hence the mother and child. The second invitation is for a show on the Rosengracht in Amsterdam in the Karel Ruiter Gallery. It states that Tony's work is to be found in different collections among others in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. So this corroborates Tony's story.

Steve Stein Gallery

This great oil with horses and nudes has been shown in Steve Stein's Gallery in Los Angeles. It is more European in style, breaking up the big canvas in smaller paintings that are incorporated in the total composition. When I asked him one day why he did that Tony answered: I won't have the time to paint them all...

Action

Here you see Tony Mafia in action in Hoboken. I am showing three pictures because he uses pencil, pastel oil crayons and oil: that is what I mean when I state that a drawing is mixed media. The yellow angel was shown in Leonhard's Fine Arts Gallery in Braschaat. The pictures were taken 1998 by his friend DL. Note the writing in pencil around the second drawing and how different the colors are. He often had two drawings going and an oil painting at the same time, sometimes creating totally different paintings with the same colors, sometimes using different forms and styles. He did what he felt was needed to get a good result.

Galerie Françoise Besnard

This exhibition was held in 1966 after spending time in Casares and bringing down the work he had created there. We met Madame Besnard one day in Paris while Tony was showing me the old galleries where he showed. Listening to the two of them speak it was clear that Tony's story that they sold out the show was true. She said: We did well then. I still have two of your paintings in my living room. All the stories told me and having been able to check out a few of them, makes me think that all he told was a always a nice story, yet always based on some truth.

Press article

This is how Tony looked in th early seventies. The article about the show in Gebo Gallery in 1971 in Antwerp is titled Tony Mafia painter and poet. In that period with Ann he did a lo of mother and child drawings which the article reproduces here.


He also wrote around most drawings. At the show every one of those drawings had a card with the English and Dutch text.

In the window they are

A series of paintings owned by DL will be shown here, put in the window so to speak. I thank him for this opportunity. This is a 1989 drawing, with the Arizona landscape in the background, an angry dog and indeed people looking in. This might be a Las Vegas painting when he still was in the La Brea Gallery or briefly after that. I seem to remember DL gave Tony a Shell gas card. So Tony was always mobile and could get milk and stuff at the gas stations...

Unicorn

Yesterdays post ended that 'the artist' was Tony's default personality. Here you see The Unicorn in the La Brea Gallery in Las Vegas with Tony and the owner of the gallery Ed. That show lead to long articles with plenty of color photographs in two Las Vegas newspapers: The Nevadan, September 28 1986 with as a title: Tony Mafia, A brilliant vagabond sets up in North Las Vegas and at the front Page: Artist Tony Mafia is fervent apostle of the abstract. The second is the Las Vegas Review Journal, September 30. August 28 also in 1986, the Las Vegas Sun ran a major article. It gives a decent biography and talks also about Tony's plans... In that period he became a kind of celebrity and got into trouble with the Minotaur Gallery about Salvador Dali's signature and about a Roy Nieman seascape... Those stories maybe are better left untold.

Shows

A picture of a show of Tony's paintings in Leonhard's Fine Art Gallery with fellow painter Christine Comijn. The drawing in the background is a double piece on paper in one large frame. It features the Arizona desert and Indians, a quite typical mixed media that has power. Note when you enlarge the drawing the white horses.

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.