George Huntington Hartford II (April 18, 1911 – May 19,
2008) was an heir to the A&P supermarket fortune. When he died in 2008,
obituaries noted that, Hartford "had once ranked among the world's richest
people." Hartford was an American businessman, philanthropist, filmmaker,
and art collector. He owned Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and had numerous
other business and real estate interests over his lifetime including the Oil
Shale Corporation (TOSCO), which he founded in 1955.
Huntington was a strong patron of the arts, building an
artists colony above Los Angeles and later a gallery in New York City, and his
opinions the arts were equally strong. He criticized Abstract Expressionists,
believing they had ushered in a great "ice age of art," freezing out
the grand traditions of music, painting and sculpture; he described Pablo
Picasso as a "mountebank." Beyond expressionism, he derided the
"beatnik, the Existentialist, the juvenile delinquent, the zaniest of abstract
art, the weirdest aberrations of the mentally unbalanced, the do-nothing
philosophy of Zen Buddhism" as a result of wanton "abuse of liberty
and freedom." He had strong opinions against the work of Tennessee
Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Willem de Kooning, as well as art dealer Sidney
Janis.
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