Naomi Graffman, 90, painter and wife of former Curtis director Gary Graffman

Naomi Graffman, 90, a painter and writer who was the wife of former Curtis Institute of Music director and president Gary Graffman, died Monday, June 17, at a long-term-care facility in Manhattan.

With her husband, Mrs. Graffman was a partner in guiding Curtis through a critical era of growth and an expanded public profile between 1986 and 2006. So close was their partnership, they were sometimes referred to with the portmanteau Garomi.

"People kind of saw it as a Gary and Naomi thing at Curtis,” said current Curtis president and director Roberto Díaz. “She was always there, she was very active, she volunteered at the school in so many different ways. It was a team effort between her and Gary.”

Each came to the school with personal connections. He started at Curtis as a student, at age 7. Less known is that she crossed the school’s threshold even earlier. Her father, Max Helfman, was accepted as a composition student of Rosario Scalero’s at the school around the time she was born, and she would visit as little more than a toddler.

“I remember the Common Room with awe, because of the ceiling,” she said for a Curtis oral history interview. “In the first place, it was so high. And the second place, it had all this colored glass, which was simply marvelous.”

The elaborate, old-world space was dedicated as the Gary and Naomi Graffman Common Room in 2006.

As the wife of the director, Mrs. Graffman poured tea there every Wednesday from the school’s samovar, chatting with students in her soft-spoken voice and introducing her own brownies to the tradition.

“She was so much fun, she really was,” says David Hayes, who arrived at Curtis as a conducting student as the Graffmans came onto the scene and who graduated in 1989. “She had this very quiet, mischievous humor.”

Behind the scenes, she was a force. When public relations executive Ann Diebold began working at Curtis in 1988, Mrs. Graffman mentored her on how to craft news releases, stories, speeches, biographies, advertisements, and other materials. “She was an exacting and fearless editor,” recalled Diebold. “We would keep going at whatever it was until, at least in her mind, it was perfect.”

Born in New York, Mrs. Graffman studied composition with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe, said Gary Graffman, now a piano instructor at Curtis. Helfman, her father, was a well-known choral composer and conductor associated with Park Avenue Synagogue and the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, a Jewish retreat.

She attended the High School of Music and Art and, despite being steeped in music, ultimately chose to be an artist. She worked in oils, and for decades kept a studio at the Art Students League of New York, next to the Graffmans’ home on 57th Street.

Her works hang in the homes of pianist Yuja Wang, conductor Yuri Temirkanov, and Curtis piano professor Eleanor Sokoloff.

Sokoloff bought one of her paintings at an exhibition — a field of yellow flowers in an industrial setting — for $1,000, “and she took that money and gave it to Curtis. I thought it was very sweet,” said Sokoloff, who called her a “warm, loving human being.”

Students thought so, too. The Graffmans had no children, but at Curtis they found themselves with more than 150 charges at any given time.

“She had a wonderful role as everyone’s mom-away-from-home when Gary was director,” said Díaz.

Mrs. Graffman first caught sight of her future husband when he was a 12-year-old pianist playing a concert in Town Hall.

“Her mother dragged her and said, ‘See, if you practice, you could play here, too,’ and she hated me at this point,” said Gary Graffman. She apparently softened her view when they met years later at Tanglewood, where Mrs. Graffman was singing in the chorus. They married in 1952.

She worked for the Judson, O’Neill & Judd division of Columbia Artists Management Inc. — CAMI — and at a certain point faced a decision.

“That was when I began to have concerts, and she wanted to travel with me, and she did a few times,” said Gary Graffman. She was secretary to William M. Judd, who said that she could either stick with her career in artist management and become a vice president the following season, or travel with Graffman. She chose the latter.

She did more than travel with the pianist. She gave advice and wrote his speeches. She wrote occasional arts stories for the New York Times. And she helped her husband write his 1981 memoir, I Really Should Be Practicing.

“She translated it into intelligible English,” Gary Graffman said.

Other than her husband, she leaves no immediate survivors.

Per her wishes, no memorial or celebration is being planned, he said. Donations in her name may be made to the Curtis Institute of Music, 1726 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103.