Orlando – Two weeks ago the Orlando Museum of Art opened what museum director Glen Gentele calls “the single most important collection of art to come to the Museum in its history.” He was speaking of the new J. Hyde Crawford and Anthony Tortora Gallery.
Named for the late fashion illustrator, the gallery opened with its first exhibit at the 30th Anniversary Gala of OMA’s collecting group on Oct. 9.
Born in Jacksonville in 1930, James Hyde Crawford was a Central Florida native. He grew up in Orlando and after graduating from Orlando High School attended the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and started his career as a freelance illustrator shortly after, working alongside and for artists and haute couture designers such as Andy Warhol, Emanuel Ungaro, and Calvin Klein.
The real breakthrough in Crawford’s career came when New York department store Bonwit Teller invited him to redesign the iconic bouquet of violets that had long been their symbol. “They had a previous violets design that was very old-fashioned, and one day they asked me if I could sketch a new one,” Crawford told The New York Times back in 2009. “I made the new one fresher and bolder, and it took me about 25 minutes. Next morning I sent it up to the store and they loved it.”
Indeed they did. That bouquet sparked the beginning of a torrid love affair between Bonwit Teller and Mr. Crawford’s design work, as they posted those violets on every bit of merchandise imaginable and contracted him as an artist shortly thereafter. Crawford drew countless advertisements for the women’s department store, and his work was seen internationally. In 1968 he and his partner at the time Anthony J. Tortora—whose name is also remembered on the arch above the exhibit entrance—founded Quadrille, a highly successful and innovative fabric and wallpaper company.
Even throughout his wildly successful career, Crawford always kept close roots with Florida, according to longtime friend Sam Ewing.
“His mother lived here [in Orlando]… into her 90s,” Ewing tells Watermark. “He would come several times a year to visit her… [and] he had lifelong friends here.”
During these visits Crawford would host a plethora of art exhibitions in the Central Florida area.
Crawford died in May of last year, survived only by his husband Charles W. Andrews and a massive art collection distributed between their three homes. Shortly after, a group of his close friends began organizing a donation of this amalgamation to the Orlando Museum of Art. “[Before his death] we had the idea and made the suggestion that Jay give the collection to Orlando, which he did,” says Ewing.
This group, dubbed “Friends of J. Hyde Crawford,” pulled together the money to renovate the empty storage space inside the museum and convert it into the new gallery.
While the gallery itself is permanent, the current exhibition runs only until Nov. 2. The nine pieces are all from Crawford’s personal collection, which he kept at his townhouse in New York City.
“These paintings were collected when they [Crawford and Tortora] were together, in the 60s and 70s maybe even the early 80s,” says Ewing about the exhibit. “That’s why the collection is the J Hyde Crawford and Anthony Tortora Collection, even though he and Charles Andrews were together for 30 years… Jay and Anthony, they bought these things together, and when Anthony died [in 1984] Jay inherited it.”
The nine pieces showing currently are a mix of some of the leading contemporary artists of Crawford and Tortora’s day. Included among the collection are works by Abstract Expressionists Andrew Tavarelli, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler, as well as modern realists Claudio Bravo and Alan Magee.
Thrown into the mix are two of Crawford’s favorites as well, Neo-Classical works by the 19th-century French painters Rosa Bonheur and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Overall, the collection is priced at $8.3 million.
“Museum quality art exists in many private collections in our community,” comments Francine Newberg, president of the museum’s Acquisition Trust, about the exhibit. “It would be wonderful if other collectors follow Jay’s example. This is how museums become major institutions.”
The Orlando Museum of Art’s dedication of the gallery to Crawford is a fitting legacy to a man who, no matter how high his career climbed, kept close to his Central Florida roots.
“Jay was a wonderful man,” remarks Ewing. “He could’ve been a fashion designer, he could’ve been an architect; he was good at everything. He had the best eye for design of anybody I had ever been around. He was a tremendous friend, and I just I learned so much from him just being around him.”
MORE INFO:
WHAT: J. Hyde Crawford Exhibit
WHERE: Orlando Museum of Art
DETAILS: OMART.org
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