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| 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.
from the August 2, 2007 edition
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Gerald and Sara became the consummate Americans to their admiring friends. In October 1923, the Swedish Ballet premièred the first American jazz ballet. Gerald had conceived its plot, sets, and costumes and enlisted his Yale classmate Cole Porter to write the score.
Gerald rapidly absorbed the principles of cubism and found in its overlapping planes a language to reconcile the shards of his experience.
Decades before Andy Warhol, he inserted American consumer products into his compositions, turning items that his father might sell – such as razors – into semiabstract images of iconic power.
The seven paintings that survive of the 14 he produced between 1922 and 1929 are on display along with reproductions of lost originals.
His majestic, six-foot-square "Watch" (1925) magnifies a watch's innards into a symphony of interlocking parts that seem ready to spring to life.
The exhibition also displays Sara's exquisite watercolors and drawings.
On Cap d'Antibes, the Murphys turned daily life into a work of art. They imported the ebullient life of East Hampton summers to the Cote d'Azur with beach parties, canoeing, corn on the cob, jazz, and vigorous athletics. At their "Villa America," they gathered gifted friends whom they nurtured with connections, guidance, and financial aid.
The Murphys inspired major literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and John Dos Passos. On view are letters from these and other writers, Fernand Léger's watercolors of their sailing excursions, and drawings by Picasso that render Sara and her companions as classical figures.
But by the mid-1930s, both of the Murphys's teenage sons had died. So the family returned to New York for good, and with his years as an artist behind him, Gerald revived the family business.
Even in their later years, Sara and Gerald continued to nurture talented people. The circle of artists they inspired grew to emcompass a younger generation of writers, including Lillian Hellman, William Jay Smith, Maeve Brennan, Dawn Powell, Brendan Gill, and Calvin Tomkins.
Although in reduced circumstances, the Murphys remained discerning advocates of new art, music, and literature.
They thought it a privilege to support the birth of, as a quotation found among Gerald's notes puts it: "a piece of music no one has written, a painting no one has painted, something impossible to predict, fathom, or describe."
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