Feb 9, 2026 · 9 min · 5 segments
In February 1974, a young artist named Tony Shafrazi walked into the Museum of Modern Art, pulled out a can of cherry-red spray paint, and wrote "KILL LIES ALL" across Picasso's Guernica—the most…
His father worked for an oil company, and his parents divorced when Shafrazi was two.
At 13, he was sent to England for schooling, a decision that would eventually plant him in the center of the Western art world.
After studying at the Royal College of Art, he visited New York in 1965 and ended up staying at a YMCA across the street from Andy Warhol's factory.
According to him, on his first day in New York, he walked over and introduced himself to Warhol, because apparently that's the kind of thing Tony Shafrazi did.
And he claimed to have also met Roy Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli in the same week.
Shafrazi thought of himself as both an artist and a provocateur, part activist, part showman, and always orbiting the gravitational pull of fame and power.
The giant painting rendered in black and white feels almost cinematic, with fractured bodies, gaping mouths, and a light bulb that doubles as an eye of God.
After debuting in San Francisco and New York in 1939, Guernica became an exile of sorts.
And for decades, it hung there behind its thick layer of varnish, the world's most famous pacifist now safely contained.
And the day before Shafrazi's act, President Richard Nixon announced clemency for Lieutenant William Calley, the only U.S. officer convicted for the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, where hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children, had been killed.
But even with the reduced timing of Kali's sentencing coming so hot on the heels of Shafrazi's act, Shafrazi had been brewing this for months.
He'd been influenced by conceptual artists like Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner, artists who shifted meaning by moving words or materials from one context to another.
And he liked that the painting was black and white because it seemed like the front page of a newspaper, and he wanted to bring it, quote, back onto the front page, end quote.
Even the phrase he wrote, kill lies all, was designed to read like a headline, and its syntax was deliberately unstable.
His father worked for an oil company, and his parents divorced when Shafrazi was two.
At 13, he was sent to England for schooling, a decision that would eventually plant him in the center of the Western art world.
After studying at the Royal College of Art, he visited New York in 1965 and ended up staying at a YMCA across the street from Andy Warhol's factory.
According to him, on his first day in New York, he walked over and introduced himself to Warhol, because apparently that's the kind of thing Tony Shafrazi did.
And he claimed to have also met Roy Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli in the same week.
Shafrazi thought of himself as both an artist and a provocateur, part activist, part showman, and always orbiting the gravitational pull of fame and power.
The giant painting rendered in black and white feels almost cinematic, with fractured bodies, gaping mouths, and a light bulb that doubles as an eye of God.
After debuting in San Francisco and New York in 1939, Guernica became an exile of sorts.
And for decades, it hung there behind its thick layer of varnish, the world's most famous pacifist now safely contained.
And the day before Shafrazi's act, President Richard Nixon announced clemency for Lieutenant William Calley, the only U.S. officer convicted for the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, where hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children, had been killed.
But even with the reduced timing of Kali's sentencing coming so hot on the heels of Shafrazi's act, Shafrazi had been brewing this for months.
He'd been influenced by conceptual artists like Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner, artists who shifted meaning by moving words or materials from one context to another.
And he liked that the painting was black and white because it seemed like the front page of a newspaper, and he wanted to bring it, quote, back onto the front page, end quote.
Even the phrase he wrote, kill lies all, was designed to read like a headline, and its syntax was deliberately unstable.
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