Eugene Hyde’s family exposing some of his works at Olympia Gallery

FROM FEBRUARY 20 to March 8, many of the late Eugene Hyde’s artworks belonging to his family are on an exhibition called, ‘Eugene Hyde 1931-1980 – A Retrospective & Exhibition of the Family Collection’, inside Olympia Gallery in Papine, St Andrew, almost 45 years after his passing, and almost 41 years since his last posthumous exhibition. He was born Eugene Seidel Hyde in 1931, and died tragically in June 1980.

“It is an honour to present our personal collection of Eugene Hyde’s work for all to see and enjoy after such a long absence. Over the years, we have felt a considerable amount of guilt about the lack of exposure of Eugene’s work. In his short life, his contribution to the development and the history of the Jamaican art movement is invaluable,” the family (Beth, Adam and Duncan Hyde) says in the acknowledgement section of the show’s catalogue.

They were all at the launch on the evening of Thursday, February 20, when Adam briefly addressed the gathering, recalling personal and professional memories of his father, among other things. Since Eugene’s passing on June 15, 1980, the current exhibition is his sixth posthumous show. From July 8-11, 1980, there was one at Calvin College Art Department in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and, in the same year on September 15, Gallery Barrington at Union Square in St Andrew hosted a show called ‘Eugene Hyde’.

On March 23, 1981, director/curator of the National Gallery, Dr David Boxer, opened another show at John Peartree Gallery, which Hyde founded in 1970. John Peartree hosted ‘The John Peartree Gallery says Farewell to Haughton Avenue’ from June 6-12, 1982. On April 15, 1984, the National Gallery of Jamaica mounted ‘Eugene Hyde 1931-1980: A Retrospection’. None of the work exhibited in 1984 is on show this time around.

“However, they call us to revisit, reflect and think about Hyde’s aesthetics, his visual art practice, some of his personal beliefs, and ultimately his legacies that are significant even to this day and relevant for Jamaica’s policies towards the visual arts, as well as for its architectural and material heritage,” Jamaican art historian, Rosalie Smith McCrea, writes in the foreword of the aforementioned catalogue.

“Hyde, in my view, was a post-modern Jamaican artist. He was one of the first to introduce the ‘Series’, as a method of contemplating and resolving a subject. His work was a bringing-together of mixed-media (drawing and painting). He introduced a new attitude, perception and procedure to his practice, as well, which generally we may refer to as a post-modern allegorical impulse.”

The pieces in the Olympia Gallery now do not reflect the numbers that he had created. They are principally abstract, of which two are works on paper. The rest are mainly paintings and etchings, or a mixture of both, and include the 1957 ‘Triptyche’ series, the 1969 and 1979 ‘Spathodia’ series, the ‘Red’ and ‘Green’ crotons from the 1970s ‘Croton’ series, the ‘Children’ series, and, of course, Eugene’s wife and three children are also depicted in different styles.

There are many untitled pieces exuding politics, religious, love, sex, etc. The ‘nudes’ are also in the mix. ‘Red Abstract’ is glaring and provocative’, so is the politics in ‘Losing Your Head for Red’ and an untitled 1978 piece on mixed media. They are all reprinted in the show catalogue, which also carries images and text from the 1984 National Gallery of Jamaica show, and segments on various aspects of Hyde’s professional life and work.

“He was one of the early Jamaican artists to introduce figurative and non-figurative abstract expressionism to the Jamaican public in the early 1960s. His oeuvre reflects his solid commitment to the abstract mode, at the expense of more traditional and popular styles still operating today … ,” the catalogue’s conclusion says.

“Throughout his entire career, his art took inspiration not only from the human figure, but also from the rich and varied Jamaican flora and fruit life, so much of which came from his native Portland (where he was born in Cooper’s Hill).”

Pieces from the Spathodia Series, the Croton Series, the Heliconia Series, a ‘hibiscus’, and the 1960 lithograph, ‘The Banana Man’, are some examples of how life in Portland has inspired some of his works.

In 1963, Eugene Hyde himself said, “Art, an experience, a life, to live, to appreciate, to be a part, to understand after the last breath has blown into the atmosphere; to live and breathe an existence into eternity; to pretend to lie is not to understand – to be a part, to be involved, is to be.”