 |
| Long before Andy Warhol, Gerald included consumer products in his paintings. 'Razor' (1924): Oil on canvas, 32-1/16 x 36-1/2
in., Gerald Murphy. Courtesy of the Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly/VAGA, NYC |
Gerald and Sara Murphy: socialites turned artistic luminaries
A travelling exhibition chronicles the intertwining story of their life and art.
By Susan Saccocciafrom the August 2, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
The handsome scion of the Mark Cross Co. marries a debutante of incandescent beauty. But rejecting the staid world of wealth that awaits them, Gerald and Sara Murphy sail to France and reinvent their lives. Gerald becomes a distinctly American cubist painter, and together the Murphys create an American-style paradise on the Riviera.
The intertwining story of their life and art is the subject of a captivating exhibition, "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy," on view until Nov. 11 at the Williams College of Art in Williamstown, Mass. The exhibition then travels to the Yale Art Gallery and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Unfolding like a family album, the exhibition blends major works by Gerald and his contemporaries with memorabilia – films, books, letters, photographs, and home movies – to portray a way of life that was itself a work of art.
On display is Sara's portrait on the cover of a 1915 issue of Town & Country magazine and photographs of Sara steering a yacht, riding an elephant in India, and dancing in the surf with Gerald.
Murphy memorabilia include a letter from Gerald's headmaster noting his lackluster schoolwork and his yearbook picture from the Yale Class of 1912, which voted him "best dressed" and "greatest social light."
In June 1921, after Gerald completed his World War I service, the couple left for Europe with their young children – Honoria, Baoth, and Patrick.
Reflecting the course their lives took in France, the exhibition quickly turns a corner. Near a luminous portrait of Sara by William James Jr. (a nephew of Henry James) stands a wall of cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Le Corbusier, and others.
Seeing these works in galleries while strolling Paris on an October day in 1921, "put me into an entirely new orbit," Gerald said.
"If that's painting," he told Sara, "that's the kind of painting that I would like to do."
Gerald and Sara studied abstract painting and joined the avant-garde who were designing sets for Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes.
Drawings and photographs convey the glamor and camaraderie of Paris in the '20s, when artists were creating new ways of depicting experience in the wake of postwar chaos. Their caldron of stimuli included Russian folk art, machinery, African motifs, ancient classical forms, and American ingenuity in all forms – from jazz to industrial innovations.
RSS feed
