the suffering it inflicts upon innocent civilians. Shafrazi was later given five years' probation, without a trial. Art Basel 2012 Shafrazi dedicated his booth at Art Basel 2012 to his own artwork and caused a stir. After nine hours, he added other artists to his booth. Art dealer In 1976, only a few years after the spray painting incident, Shafrazi returned to his homeland and became the art advisor to the Shah of Iran and Kamran Diba, then director of the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art. Shafrazi went to about 15 of the top New York dealers at the time — including Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, Paula Cooper, John Weber, and Irving Blum — and helped assemble a 20th-century art collection on the Shah's behalf within four years. As he did so his power expanded in the art market. The museum Shafrazi had constructed in Tehran to house this collection epitomized the Shah's modern Iranian state, thus the collection was predominantly Western: from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Conceptual Art, including works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Willem de Kooning. In 1978, Shafrazi briefly opened his own commercial gallery in a small Tehran shopfront but closed it because of conditions in the country leading up to the 1979 Revolution. He lost much of his art during that time but safely returned to New York City. Shafrazi converted his rented apartment into a makeshift gallery where he slept on a small loft bed at night. In 1979, he opened his first New York City gallery, and within a few years he had made his reputation handling talents like Donald Baechler and then-hot graffiti artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf. Throughout the 1980s he exhibited numerous artists of various tendencies including William S. Burroughs, Patrick Caulfield, Mark Dagley, Gerard Hemsworth, Michael Heizer, Olivier Mosset and Keith Sonnier along with European artists like Brian Clarke, Enzo Cucchi, Hervé Di Rosa, and Jean-Charles Blais. In 1990, he opened a new 13,000-square-foot gallery at 119 Wooster Street, with an exhibition entitled "American Masters of the 60's" and including Carl Andre, Tom Wesselmann, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. In 1999, the Francis Bacon estate chose Shafrazi as its United States representative. In 2004, the gallery opened another space on 26th Street with a large show of paintings by Picasso, Francis Bacon and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Shafrazi's gallery closed