Tony Mafia

A BIOGRAPHY OF TONY MAFIA, BY HIS WIFE ANNMARIE SAUER

Robert Lee Alderson was born on August 4th 1931, second son to a very pretty lady and a Cherokee. The hard times he was born in, filled his soul with hunger. When he was eight years old his father, who could no longer deal with the blatant racism he was subjected to, drank acid and died a horrible self-inflicted death. The four children were placed in an Indian orphanage. For Tony and his older brother Bill it was Laurence Hall for Boys in Chicago. There, Father Bennet saw that he was a special child and had him tested. It turned out he had an uncanny sense of visual balance. As a result he got a grant to the Chicago Art Institute where he followed the drawing classes with the grown-ups. Also a second year till the priest discovered that the students had progressed to do nude studies and he deemed this unfit for a small boy of nine.

At the age of 14 he ran away from the orphanage and hitchhiked, worked his way to San Francisco where his mother was then married to Mario Mafai. This Sicilian ‘ran the money for the ponies’ to Las Vegas. So the name got turned into Mario Mafia. Tony wanting to get out of the constraints and red neck mentality and realities of all that was connected to his birth name chose to be Tony Mafia. His stepfather's Italian friends took to Tony and taught him to make a mean Bolognese sauce. At the age of 16 he asked a ‘hooker’ to pose as his mother and to give him permission to become an able bodied seaman for the merchant marine. He definitely didn’t want to become a cowboy or work in the bottle factory he worked in anyway a few years. He kind of finished high school while being a sailor and missed a boat in 1947 in Antwerp, Belgium. It took him six months to find a ship out.

He always said: there I learned that air has light and color. He tried to get into the Academy but was not accepted. That doesn’t mean a thing since Van Gogh hadn’t been accepted either… He kept coming back to Antwerp where we met in 1968. He married young, had a daughter, got divorced, married again and had another daughter. On a drunken night a group of friends all got married in Mexico and found out the wedding counted, so after five weeks the third marriage was annuled. I met this lady in 2004 and told her, she was the only one of his four ex-wives he had never said a bad word about. Somewhere in between the second and third marriage he thought he had joined the Foreign Legion, but it turned out the Air force just had new uniforms and he only found out in boot camp where he actually was. He was stationed in Germany, where after some tribulations they let him restore the old churches that had been damaged during the war. Therefore he needed to learn the old techniques. He always spoke with respect of the German schools where they ‘didn’t mess with your head, but just showed you what you could do’. He has a sculpting of Roy Rodger in the Pentagon and among others did a portrait in Korea of General McArthur. During his leave he would always go to Paris where later he lived ‘on the fourth floor in a chambre de bonne’ after having stayed in Hotel Belgique for a while. He had a good period meeting a lot of people like Jacques Brel and some of the Hollywood stars. He also spent six month in Casares in Spain, painting for an exhibition in the Gallerie Françoise Besnard in Paris and selling out. Tony never could or would give exact indications of years. He must have been back in California during that period too. Anyway in the sixties he was put in prison in Denmark for selling a drawing without a license and having insufficient funds: Six month of solitary confinement. They let him sell his good old banjo to the guard to pay the fine.

He went straight to Paris where he met a Danish lady whom he later married. He had a period of hard work and sometimes lots of money, sometimes spending it all in one night. He was a typical rebel with tons of charisma so that the others would project their longing into his life. Men saw him as what they wanted to be and women wanted to be with him to become an Indian, or an artist, or more vital or more depressed. In his fourth marriage he had two children, still living in Los Angeles. In the early seventies they split up. Because of his health situation (a bad heart) he had to cancel all contracts with the galleries. The Veterans Administration would only take care of him if he had no income. The decision did keep him alive but ruined his artistic career. After that he only did smaller shows in Europe for fear of being found out by the VA. He played music, acted a bit, even was in a musical as a chorus boy.

Many have collected his work. I think the most honest assessment is that ‘he had a cult status in an inner circle’. He also had quite a temper, so made enemies in a second and friends in half a second. We met first in Antwerp while he was playing folk and folk rock and flamenco. In August 1968 I saw the first drawings and walked home with a few. Only in 1991 Tony and I became an item and got married. He did do a few bigger good shows and worked very hard and intensely during these last years of his life.

I haven’t mentioned his Far East experiences, but they are gruesome. He arrived in Shanghai, when Shanghai fell and saw how 10.000 people were executed in the streets. He carried the fear of death deep within himself.

Over the years he also wrote strange poetic parables and songs. Some of those I collected and translated in ‘My book, my life’. Of course, he lived regularly in Las Vegas: as a young man when his mother was a dancer there and regularly in the seventies and eighties when he had a gallery for a while. He knew some of the celebrities coming through Vegas.

Tony’s life was the stuff of myths and I try not to proclaim the ultimate truth but to let everybody hang on to their own version of Tony Mafia…

http://tonymafiathepainter.blogspot.com

• ****** THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG

Thoughts by the Work of Tony Mafia

Of this time, but no part of any school or direction, makes Tony Mafia a lonely painter, lonely in his art. He paints the world as the world reveals itself to him, in a passionate, driven way, using those techniques that serve his purpose best in the expression of his feelings and insights. He plays the full pallet of colours, materials and styles that an experienced painter has at the tip of his fingers. What the French poet Queneau says about poetry is here applicable to painting: It is a means to help our deficient reason (raison déficiente) in learning the unveiled truth. Although Tony Mafia’s work stems from his singular experience, the result is universal. This universe is shown in a questioning search in a wide range of subjects. Each canvas and each drawing is a “finished piece of art” and in such constitutes a temporary but certain answer. In his paintings he shuns the too slick, too finished and too easy and resolutely turns too an effect that seems primitive without being naive however.

The work of this painter can be more or less dealt with in following broad categories of subjects: Painting, Circus and Harlequins, Paintings influenced by his Native American heritage (Honandaga Cherokee), Religious, Spanish/Mexican themes, Nudes, Political works, abstracts. This is by no mean exhaustive for the work Tony Mafia paints. A separate study should also be made about the landscapes and their function in this painter’s work. This will however be dealt with in another article.

Painting It is logical that an artist reflects upon his art. Poets write about language and poetry and in novels we can read about writing and the genesis of the novel. Many of the self-portraits of Tony Mafia show the painter at work: I am a painter! First and foremost painter! that is the message of these canvasses. In other works of this group the problem of reality and reflected truth is dealt with: on the canvas the painter is shown in the studio with the model and the painting showing the studio and the painter and the model... , deconstructing and reconstructing his artistic realities. This theme is touched upon in many paintings, by rendering paintings in the background, figures with paintings in their hands. Pallet and brush on the canvas remind us that the painting is a representation of a reality and at the same time a material reality as art object. In the small painting “Painters at play” it is suggested in a playful way how the painters with their different brushes and colours paint the world and so giving it colour and life. “In a paint dance for Annmarie” the artist draws not only on his being a painter, but also on his Native American heritage, two truly defining factors of the man that is Tony Mafia.

Some titles: The studio, A paint dance for Annmarie, Selfportrait, Painters at play, To say the calling of colour....

Circus and Harlequins A trapezium artist trying to find her balance, a painting one can almost jump into, fall into, without a net, the other acrobat sitting quietly on his trapeze looking away uninterested... On the ladder, doomingly dark almost demonic figures are climbing up and up... An allegory of this world? Circus and Harlequins, also dancers and musicians are grateful subjects. They can express every human emotion, they give a freedom in colour and form, they wear costumes in which the painter can explode in reaching forms and abundant, exhilarating colour, going from the intimate to the grotesque. Sometimes these figures are put in a magical/mythical landscape as in the painting where the harlequins almost raise up from the sea to the sky. I read this painting as dealing with the four ages of man, the journey from birth to Death, with the powerful, masterful figure of mid-life. In the Dancers the figures are bound by a simultaneous gesture of tenderness and power.; In the slightly reclining head against the even grey of the sky - with barely a suggestion of light over the almost fugitive landscape, I feel revolt, combativeness. For me this painting is the perfect representation of ‘L’homme révolté’ the philosophical essay by Albert Camus. The dance as resistance, beauty defying fate.

Some titles: Circus, Harlequins, Appled, The high wire, Trapezium, Dancers, The jester...

Native American An important part of Tony Mafia’s work is inspired by being Native American. His father was Onandaga 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 recognised and understood in one look. In contrast, in Tony’s work it are the elements of form and colour that touch you and only in further viewing the icons can be recognised and deciphered and the magic of colours is let loose in a “story”.

Some titles: The sentinel, The tree, Across the mountain, Indian Spirit, The Potter, Katchina’s, The killing of the stallion, Three mythical horses...

Religious paintings There is a clear religious quest. One will see Jesus Christ depicted as a human being. So there is the majestic ‘Taking Christ off the Cross” in which the cross and the halo’s are red with blood and human suffering. A pregnant Eve offers apples for sale in the church portal while the believers kneel in the background, praying to the Madonna. In the drawing “The garden of Eden”, in the painting in the Southern Baptist church in Chloride” Christ” where he is shown as a carpenters son with grapes in his hand, always there is the pain of the human being. “The Prophet and the book” is a painting in which the unicorn and the lusty satyr have there place next to the prophet sending embryos into the world. Indian Spirits, Angels, a god feeding the dancer, crucifixions, it are all expressions of a deeply doubting religious feeling.

Some titles: The Christ taken off the cross, Eden, Eve, The prophet....

Spanish/Mexican paintings 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. This village, with its bizarre soul surfaces now and then again as in “The lady with the goat”. 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. 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 colour.

Some titles: The Picador, The Lady and the goat, Andaluz, Asking permission to kill, The Guitar player, Beginning of always, The gypsy...

Nudes 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.

Some titles: The studio (see before), Sing Promises, The voyeur, And in rides the storm...

Political paintings The fact of doing politically inspired paintings, does not mean at all that the painting is like a manifesto or indoctrinating. The painter portrays his feelings and ideas mostly as a reaction to an event. This can be the before mentioned felling of a sacred tree or the landslide victory of the Republicans for the Congress, an Anti-American demonstration by the extreme right in Strasbourg, France or Che Guevara who has become a poster boy... Injustice and violence touch him deeply, political hypocrisy and two facedness make him angry and from this involvement he paints. So there are the paintings grafted on the Peace and Freedom movement in the United States, but also the imposing painting in which he shows that we all pay “The whore’s fair/fare” for war and violence. In strong colours and with a secure touch he depicts the battle with the standards and flags in the background. Throughout the painting there are death horses and whores seducing in their naked forms and making one pay. Quiet a painting that makes one think!

Some titles: Sad, Peace, No more war, The whore’s fair/fare, A Poster boy....

Abstracts Abstract work can of course also be part of the above mentioned categories. It is however also possible that a piece of work is hard etched abstract or lyrical abstract. Sometimes the painter writes a text on the painting which will make its intentions clear. Very often in these paintings the joy of colour, the pleasure in handling the medium, the search for and the giving of freedom to the forms are the driving force. In this type of work Tony Mafia builds on the power of colour to express his feelings and to communicate them to the viewer. In most of his painting there are elements of abstraction present.

Some titles: What more is needed? Black snow, My life is golden, People in the sun....

It will be obvious by now that not all Tony Mafia’s painting fit this mould. A large number of his paintings defy classification. I have for instance not spoken about landscapes, because very seldom will you find a painting that is just a landscape. In his work this element fulfils a specific formal role, as metaphor, as a passageway, an escape into a space of rest and peace, as atmosphere, as bond that the painter has with this world and so is the expression of his deeply felt emotions.

Neither have I spoken about the drawings in pen and ink, nor about his water-colours and writings. Nothing has been said about his etchings and portraits or sculpting. It is obvious Tony Mafia is a many faceted master, whose work holds its place next to the other contemporary masters.

Some titles: The bathers, God feeding the dancer, The fence, Red outline, I have felt you in the Morn...

Annmarie Sauer Antwerpen - March 1998

• Reference: FamilySearch Genealogy - SmartCopy: Nov 16 2022, 23:28:42 UTC