J. Hyde Crawford and Anthony Tortora Collection

The J. Hyde Crawford and Anthony Tortora Collection includes works by important American artists who rose to prominence in the decades following World War II. At the time that Crawford and Tortora were forming this collection, these were among the leading contemporary artists of the day. Friedel Dzubas, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Kenzo Okada and Andrew Tavarelli were associated with the period’s key art movements including Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. Richard Diebenkorn was an innovative member of the West Coast’s Bay Area Figurative Movement, which challenged the primacy of abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s. Claudio Bravo and Alan Magee, on the other hand, successfully established modern styles of vivid realist painting that were based in traditions going back to the Baroque era. While there is diversity in the collection, all of these artists were engaged in the progressive aesthetic ideas that shaped the art of their time. Also included in the collection are two paintings by Rosa Bonheur and Jean-Leon Gerome, popular French academic painters of the 19th century.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website