[guitar music plays]
>> Ted DeGrazia was born in the small mining town of Morenci,
three years before Arizona became a state.
The son of Italian immigrants would rise from these humble beginnings
to become the most reproduced artist in the world.
>> He works in the mine for a little while
and decides that's not what he wants; there's other things in life.
He had a real vision of himself from an early age.
>> The physical manifestation of that vision can be seen
and experienced at DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun.
This national historic district in the Catalina Foothills is as close
to a complete artist statement as you will find anywhere.
It looks as though it were dreamed into existence and is unmistakably DeGrazia.
The gallery like any building needs maintenance and so do the 15,000
or so original pieces of artwork inside it.
Charlie
>> I've been working with the DeGrazia Foundation since 2005.
Lance
>> Charlie has been working to clean and restore all of our collection for a long time.
Charlie
>> So I'm eventually going through the whole collection,
which I said is like a lifetime of work.
Lance
>> Even the most beautiful and the most famous artworks need conservation from time to time.
Nar
>> Charlie Burton is a fine art conservator, an often overlooked and critically important job.
Like DeGrazia she gravitated towards art at a young age.
Charlie
>> I moved to England to go to art school, then eventually started working
for some Dutch galleries in London,
and some people said "did you ever think about being a conservator?"
And I said "What is a conservator?"
I fell in love with it.
I specialized in 16th and 17th century Dutch paintings.
I never thought I would be back in America living.
I thought I'd just stay in England.
Nar
>> Life brought Burton to Tucson.
She started working on more contemporary artists like DeGrazia.
That brings her to this backyard in midtown Tucson to see a mysterious mural.
Charlie
>> I actually never knew it existed until the family itself called me up last February
and said that they had a DeGrazia mural.
John
>> I was six, so my comprehension of what that actually meant was very low.
It was like, oh pretty picture, here let me go play in the backyard now.
Nar
>> The mural was indeed a DeGrazia.
It was there when John McNiece's parents bought this house in 1974.
Slowly, over time, it started to succumb to the elements.
John
>> My father passed away a few months ago and we're very fortunate in having enough resources
to restore it, and we kind of felt it was a moral obligation for us to do so.
Nar
>> So they called Burton and she began the daunting restoration process.
The first step was to find out as much as possible about the mural's origin.
Charlie
>> I came back and talked with our director here about it and they said, "yes we've looked at it
about 7 or 8 years ago and we have records about that mural,
but we don't know the story behind it".
John
>> He did not sign it when he originally painted it,
the owners at that time asked him to come back.
Supposedly he was quite drunk, he misspelled the word original.
We're lucky enough that he had some photographers shooting him painting it,
at least certain aspects of it and it made it into an article
from Arizona Highways 1949, talking about him.
We have original color photographs of him which Charlie is using
to match the colors more exactly.
Nar
>> The mural appears to have been painted in 1948 or 49.
Robert and Mildred Fiche owned the home at that time.
Charlie
>> The family that owned that house were benefactors of the artist of the day.
Lance
>> DeGrazia had been looking for a place to do a large mural
>> And the family said "use these walls", so he was happy to go there and create a story.
Arizona Highways came and photographed him.
It turned out to be a very big article for him and I guess
at that time he really was quite poor.
Nar
>> It's hard to imagine DeGrazia as a struggling artist, but at that time, he was.
His style reflected on these walls was still colorful, but much more somber
than the work he later became known for.
Lance
>> He had gone to Mexico to study with Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco.
When he came back to the United States, it didn't translate into anything at all.
Charlie
>> But he still had his own style.
It was definitely there.
When you look at his women, his faces, he had quite a style already.
John
>> It's incredibly beautiful, and the more we learned about it,
it's the largest surviving DeGrazia mural in the world.
Charlie
>> I've restored some of his other murals on walls in private homes,
but they've mostly been little sketches, a little ocotilo or something like that,
not as finely detailed as this mural is.
Nar
>> Burton's job is demanding, physically and mentally.
Almost 70 years after it was painted, this mural needs a lot of work.
Charlie
>> What I'm trying to do is bring the mural back,
not try to restore it per say, but try to conserve it.
Save as much of the original paint as I can.
Nar
>> She works on areas smaller than an inch, but can never lose sight of the full picture.
Charlie
>> I really try to concentrate on what I'm doing.
You kind of go into your own little world
and you just don't even realize that time is passing so fast.
What colors was he using in his palette, cause I've been trying to look at his palettes
and we have tons of his palettes.
I was looking at the ones that were in the magazine
to see what unique colors that he might have put in there.
I want it all in the end to blend and look very similar to what it looked like at the time.
Nar
>> Burton worked on the mural 3 days a week for 6 months
and logged nearly 240 hours restoring it from this to this.
The detail and precision are astounding.
It looks as though DeGrazia just finished it.
John
>> The level of detail and care required
in getting this restored is amazing, amazingly deep and intricate.
Nar
>> Less than 10 years after this mural was originally painted,
UNICEF put Los Niño's on a greeting card.
That card sold millions worldwide and skyrocketed him to international fame.
DeGrazia cashed in making accessible work that was consumed by the masses.
Despite his wide reproduction, original DeGrazia murals are exceedingly rare.
Lance
>> There was a mural up in Phoenix about six months ago that was destroyed.
A building was bought and torn down with a very large mural inside.
So they're disappearing.
Nar
>> This labor intensive restoration gives us a glimpse into DeGrazia's mind
when he was just another struggling artist trying to find his way in the world.
Lance
>> It's a beautiful mural.
It's giant and it tells an interesting story.
Charlie
>> It's not gonna be one of these things I can just walk away from
and say it's done now and it's gonna be fine.
We're gonna have to come back and keep checking on it
and making sure the preservation stays there for the future.
There's so much significance to having this wonderful mural left for us.