In May 1976, a year and a half before the land 40 miles east of Phoenix became Lost Dutchman State Park, artist Ettore “Ted” DeGrazia led a group of journalists, a film crew, and Yaqui and Apache friends into the Superstition Mountains. Pack horses accompanied them, carrying camping gear and the cameras necessary to record what DeGrazia planned to do. After all, he’d need proof.
They rode most of the day past Saguaro cactus and through canyons with walls stretching hundreds of feet high. When they arrived at Angel Springs, they made camp among the scrub and settled in for the night. The next morning, everyone took their places, giving DeGrazia plenty of space. He made a rock fire ring, fashioned a teepee-shaped frame, and began leaning his canvases against it.
By some accounts, he doused the structure with some of the Chivas Regal whisky he had in his back pocket, but even if he didn’t, the oil in his paintings would have ignited. He lit a rolled paper and leaned it against the frames, then added a second and placed it nearby.
It didn’t take long for the fire to roar, fueled by the unframed canvases he added. The flames swallowed paintings of cherub-like Native American children, ceremonial dances he’d witnessed, horses in their pastures, and other Southwestern scenes. As fire consumed the first batch, DeGrazia added more, then stepped back and sipped his whiskey from the bottle, tears in his eyes. In total, he burned about 100 paintings that day.
“It pained him to burn those paintings,” says Lance Laber, executive director of the DeGrazia Foundation in Tucson. In fact, Laber adds, he was so upset he couldn’t paint for several years after.
But DeGrazia felt he had to make a statement. As a successful artist, his family would be taxed half the market value of any unsold art he left behind at the time of his death, and they didn’t have the money to pay. DeGrazia didn’t want to burden them, so he decided to burn his art in protest instead.
Thirty years earlier, he seemed like the last person to find himself in such a predicament — he claimed no one would even steal his paintings back then.