"Eugene Hyde (1931-1980): A Retrospective & Exhibition of the Family Collection"
27 February - March 17 2025
Olympia Main Gallery
"Looking Back on the Life and Work of Eugene Hyde: Revisiting His Legacy"
By: Rosalie Smith McCrea, Ph.D
Art historian, former Assistant Curator/Head of Education at the National Gallery of Jamaica.
Forty-one years have passed since the National Gallery of Jamaica first exposed Eugene Hyde's work to the Jamaican public, as a faithful representation of his oeuvre and studio practice at the time, in Eugene Hyde 1931-1980: A Retrospective (1984). The works exhibited now, at the Olympia Gallery, were not shown in the original Retrospective. However, they call us to revisit, reflect and think about Hyde's aesthetic, 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.
Eugene Hyde was, arguably, one of the first generation of Jamaican Post-Modernist artits who trained abroad and returned to Jamaica where he taught privately and at the Jamaica School of Art. He became a founding member of the Contemporary Jamaican Artist's Association, alongside Karl Parboosingh and Barrington Watson, and established The Gallery in 1974.
In the span of his lifetime, he was able to interact in a profound way, with Jamaica's Banking, Commercial and Hotel Industries, which allowed them to take Jamaican Art seriously and to begin to form their respective Art Collections and patronize local artists.
-- excerpt from exhibition book.
View exhibition photo album here.
View exhibition catalogue here.
Opening Night
Exhibited works
View External links and Publications
Click here to read exhibition feature on The Gleaner
Click here to read exhibition book.
"Eugene Hyde (1931-1980): A Retrospective"
by Rosalie Smith McCrea
(from the National Gallery of Jamaica exhibition April - July 1984).
"Eugene Hyde - A Retrospective" is the most important survey of the artist's work brought together since his death in 1980. It incorporates a body of drawings, paintings, prints, murals and architectural ceramic which should be seen as a selected version only, taken from a larger body of work produced by a prolific artist who left behind a substantial output.
Still, apart from Hyde's "White on White" and "Yellow on Yellow" paintings included in "The Artist and Model Series II, Paintings" held at Contemporary Jamaican Artists Association in 1968, and drawings from Suite III in "Drawings Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" exhibited at Bolivar Gallery in 1969, the Retrospective has attempted to document all Hyde's major phases and exhibitions. It hopefully will give the viewer a feeling for the personal development of Hyde's art and vision, a vision that gradually became eloquently on the human condition. Hyde indeed was a 'romantic' artist, whose overall development might not have been as immediately apparent as that coming from his more 'classicist' counterparts.
Whoever is to explore Hyde's life and work in the future more fully than this condensed exhibition and catalogue permits, will have to pay close attention to his complex personality. For one, his contradictory feelings towards commercial art which he was forced to do throughout his life in order to sustain his family and his abiding love for the practice of fine art.