"It's not what we do but what we do with our mind that counts," the painter Gerald Murphy once told a friend, who happened to be the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. "For me, only the invented parts of our life had any real meaning." If anyone was in a position to lecture Fitzgerald on the value of invention, it was Murphy. He and his wife, Sara, were at the center of one of those brilliant circles that made Paris in the twenties what you think of when you think of Paris in the twenties. They were a locus of creativity: like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, but not so annoying—and a lot better dressed.
Most people know the Murphys from Calvin Tomkins's heartbreaking biography Living Well Is the Best Revenge, but an exhibition opening this July at the Williams College Museum of Art promises to bring their extraordinary lives back into the spotlight. "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" presents, for the first time, a view into the world the couple made alongside the art and literature they inspired. This whirlwind tour of the era's culture includes family photographs by Man Ray and snapshots of Picasso corpulently disporting himself with the women of the Murphys' circle; drawings and paintings by Picasso, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger; letters from Fitzgerald (who used the Murphys as models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night); not to mention Sara's watercolors, sets Gerald designed for the Ballets Suédois, and clips from home movies starring Hemingway and Dos Passos.
To say nothing of Murphy's own paintings. He made only 15, of which seven survive; all seven are in the show. They are clearly a product of those exciting early days of modernism, but the independence of their style is striking—especially when you consider who Murphy's friends were. These big, bright, meticulously graphic canvases celebrate commercial objects in a way that anticipates Pop Art. Razor (1922) pushes iconic forms—a safety razor and fountain pen crossed in front of a box of matches—to the verge of abstraction; Watch (1925) presents the inner workings of a pocket watch so that the viewer is led into the vertiginous heart of the mechanism.
The paintings may also say something about what made Murphy tick. The show's curator, Deborah Rothschild, has studied the Murphys for years, and she believes that there's a surprising layer of personal reference behind the superflat surface of Murphy's work. Rothschild notes that he often referred to himself as a watch, and that he actually believed he looked like one, on account of his round face (which he set off stylishly with hats). Is Watch a self-portrait of the artist as machine? If so, it's a telling one: The mainspring of the watch is broken. Gerald Murphy painted for only nine years, from 1921 through 1929. There's some mystery as to why he gave up this pursuit for which he had both talent and ambition ("Before I die," he wrote Hemingway, "I'm going to do one picture which will be hitched up to the universe at some point"), although there is no shortage of practical explanations. The Murphys' two sons died within two years of each other; the family moved back to America; Murphy became president of the fine leather goods maker Mark Cross (as his father had been before him). Tomkins, who revisited his 1971 subject for the exhibition catalog, speculates that these adversities struck a chord in Murphy. "When tragedy struck them, not once but twice," he writes, "the darker side of Gerald's Irish nature seems to have assigned guilt and demanded punishment. Did he blame himself for the self-indulgence that serious art requires? I think he did."
We have the Murphys to thank (or curse) for the popularity of the French Riviera in the summertime, and for the striped sailor's jerseys and white duck pants that not even Picasso thought were cool until Murphy wore them. Whether decorating their Paris apartment with the world's largest ball bearing or ritualistically serving cookies and dry sherry on the beach at midmorning in Antibes, they simply made the ordinary wonderful. And while it lasted, they showed that the way we live can be as brilliant as any work of art.—PAUL LAFARGE
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