WHO WAS GAYLORD FLORY?

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Born in Michigan in 1919, Gaylord Flory began his career as an artist in the shadow of the Great Depression.  At the start of World War II, he enlisted in the armed services.  While serving as a field officer, he continued drawing and painting, as circumstances allowed, and in 1942 his drawings from the front lines were featured in LIFE magazine. He was later severely wounded in combat in the South Pacific.  Interestingly , he always believed that a sketchbook carried in his uniform pocket and torn by shrapnel saved his life.

 

After the war, Flory continued his art studies, first at the Art Students League and the Hans Hoffman School of Art (New York City).  Among his teachers, Hans Hoffman perhaps made the greatest impression, though Vytlicil and Yunioshi were also important mentors.  Flory then traveled to Europe to study at the Institute d'Arte in Florence and at the Academie Grand Chaumiere in Paris, where he also frequented the famous art salons of Left Bank painters, particularly that of George Braque.

 

By the early 1950s, Flory had won several coveted awards in juried competitions and had settled into life as an active member of the New York art scene.  In the summers, he joined the colony of painters on Monhegan Island in Maine.  To his work in landscape and still-life painting, he added an interest in portraiture and earned a number of significant commissions.  Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, he and his family traveled frequently to Hawaii, where he found the light and landscape hospitable to his style of painting.

 

Gaylord Flory's work has been exhibited in major museums throughout the country, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitant Museum of Art, the Modern Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. His work is held in hundreds of private collections and in the collections of a number of schools, universities, and musuems.  He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art (1964-1975).