Los Murphy. Avatares de la generación perdida.

Art

Tender Is a Toast to Avatars of the Lost Generation By DOROTHY SPEARS Published: June 24, 2007

Williams College Museum of Art At center, Gerald Murphy's "Boatdeck," now lost, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1924. More Photos >

ONE hot July in 1923 Sara Murphy, the model for Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night," posed for Picasso on the French Riviera. "Picasso adored her," reports John Richardson, his biographer. He was not alone. The fun-loving Sara, whose engagement photograph graced the cover of Town & Country magazine, attracted quite a few artists and novelists. Fitzgerald "was madly in love with her," her grandson John Donnelly said in an interview, adding that in the family there were whispers of an affair with Ernest Hemingway. "Grandmother would go down to Key West for visits," he said. "Grandfather didn't go along. He didn't like Hemingway. He thought he was a bully." Grandfather was Gerald Murphy, a disaffected heir to the Mark Cross leather goods company who took up painting when he and Sara joined the Lost Generation in Paris. His "Boatdeck," depicting a ship like the one that carried them to France, caused such a stir at the 1924 Salon des Indépendants that the 18-by-12-foot work "could scarcely be seen, so great a crush was around" it, The Paris Herald reported. His seven extant paintings form the centerpiece of "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy," opening on July 7 at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass. This major exhibition includes more than 90 artworks by friends of the Murphys like Picasso, Léger, Braque, Gris and Man Ray — and some 300 pieces of ephemera — not just letters and photographs but also home movies, Mrs. Murphy's collaged menu books and Mr. Murphy's handwritten cocktail recipes and art notebooks.

Cole Porter Collection, American Musical Theatre Collection, Yale University Music Library From left, Gerard Murphy, Genevieve Carpenter, Cole Porter and Sara Murphy in Venice in 1923.

"Making It New" captures the creative energy the couple contributed to their circle in France in the 1920s, when, as Fitzgerald wrote, "whatever happened seemed to have something to do with art." The show also invites a reassessment of Mr. Murphy as an artist: Once dismissed as a bon vivant, he is now discussed as a progenitor of Pop Art. His life as a painter began in the autumn of 1921. Strolling along the Rue la Boétie in Paris, he passed the window of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery. That German-born art dealer was holding a liquidation sale of Cubist works by Picasso, Gris, Derain, Matisse and Braque. "If that's painting," Mr. Murphy famously announced to his wife afterward, "that's the kind of painting I would like to do." He was 33 at the time, with three children. For six months he studied painting with a Russian émigré, Natalia Goncharova. (She introduced him to the Ballets Russes, where he painted stage sets — with his wife's help — using long-handled brushes like janitors' brooms.) Soon he was devoting solitary mornings and afternoons to painting. In his cavernous Parisian studio near the Montparnasse Cemetery, or in a converted gardener's cottage at Villa America, the Murphy summer home in the port town of Cap d'Antibes, he completed 14 known paintings. The seven that still exist have been gathered for the show from the collections of, among others, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and Yale.

From the Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly, licensed by VAGA, New York, NY "Razor" (1924) by Mr. Murphy.

Although his paintings were shown together in 1996 at the Phillips Collection in Washington, here his art is part of a more wide-ranging look at the role the Murphys played in France. They had a habit of "transforming the everyday into something wonderful," said Deborah Rothschild, the show's curator. "Living their lives every day as an aesthetic exercise." Whether nibbling crackers on tiny La Garoupe beach; attending bullfights with the Hemingways in Pamplona, Spain; or organizing children's art shows judged by Picasso, the Murphys "actively embraced what was in front of them," Ms. Rothschild said. In turn the couple was embraced by their friends: Cole Porter, Léger, Picasso, Man Ray, Stravinsky, Cocteau, the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, John Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker, among them. Yet even as the Murphys offered a surrogate home to this circle, they could also provoke envy and resentment. "When I like men, I want to be like them," Fitzgerald once wrote. "I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don't want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out." Which is what Fitzgerald did in his 1934 novel, "Tender Is the Night," whose main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, were modeled on Gerald and Sara Murphy. His portrayal — merging aspects of their lives and personalities with his own and those of his wife, Zelda — particularly offended Mrs. Murphy. She had tolerated Fitzgerald's tossing her Venetian wine goblets off the balcony of Villa America during a party, his accusations that "Sara's being mean to me" and his stuffing dirty hundred-franc notes into his mouth to gain her attention. "Scott would behave like a bad boy, throwing things," the Murphys' granddaughter, Laura Donnelly, 52, said in a recent interview. "Then Grandma would say: 'You're a disappointment. Sober up and come back when you can behave.' "

From the Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly, licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Mr. Murphy with Picasso on La Garoupe beach at Cap d'Antibes, 1923.

But after "Tender Is the Night " was published, "my grandparents were extremely upset with Fitzgerald," Mr. Donnelly, 56, said in a telephone interview. The older son of the Murphys' daughter, Honoria, he lives in Florida. In his posthumously published memoir, "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway also showed disdain for the Murphys, who supported him financially and emotionally early in his career. Referring to them, he wrote: "Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and stupid as a bird dog. When they said, 'It's great, Ernest' " — a reference to "The Sun Also Rises" — "I wagged my tail in pleasure ... instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it, what is wrong with it?' " The Murphys also had their private trials. In a letter to the poet Archibald MacLeish dated Jan. 22, 1931, quoted in the show's catalog, Mr. Murphy acknowledged what he called his "defect," a term used to describe homosexuality. "Not for one waking hour of my life since I was 15 have I been entirely free of the feeling of these defects," he wrote. "My subsequent life has been a process of concealment of the personal realities, at which I have been all too adept."

Museum of Modern Art, licensed by SCALA/Art Resource "Wasp and Pear" (1929) by Gerald Murphy

Later they lost their two sons in quick succession: the older, Baoth, died of spinal meningitis in 1935; the younger, Patrick, lost a long struggle with tuberculosis in 1937. The carefree lives depicted by Calvin Tomkins in a 1962 New Yorker profile under the title "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" were much more complex. "To any artist, and to a painter above all," MacLeish wrote in the catalog for Mr. Murphy's posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, "the best revenge upon life, or more precisely upon death, is not living either well or badly but creating works of art." But Mr. Murphy's sense of duty to his family and to his family's struggling business led him to give up painting in 1929, when Patrick received the diagnosis of TB. In 1934 he returned to Mark Cross, where he was president until 1956. "His heart was never in it," his granddaughter said. "He wasn't a businessman." Ms. Donnelly's pink stucco home in East Hampton, N.Y., is the converted garage and servants' quarters of what remains of the Murphy estate there. Living near the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Murphy passed it each morning, "turning his head away," MacLeish wrote in 1974. Mr. Murphy never spoke about his art, John Donnelly said, although his younger brother, Sherman, 54, recalled in a telephone interview from his Florida home that his grandfather once said "it took me a long time to get the cigar box just right" in his 1927 painting "Cocktail." Mr. Murphy was 72 when Douglas MacAgy, then the director of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, wanted to include his paintings in a 1960 group show, "American Genius in Review." "Tomorrow, I'm invading the attic, to take down 'The Watch' and whatever is rolled up with it," he replied in his pointy script, referring to a painting based on two Mark Cross pocket watches. "I pray they're in decent state." By then "Boatdeck," based on 60 photographs he had taken on trans-Atlantic trips, had been lost or cut up, Ms. Rothschild said. That machines and their inner workings — a watch, a razor, even his parents' cocktail tray — could reflect deep personal feelings, quite often defeat or failure, is a recurring theme in his art. It suggests that painting helped him distance himself from subjects that haunted or upset him.

From the Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly, licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Mr. Murphy's 1923 work, "Boatdeck."

"I was never happy until I started painting," he once admitted, "and I have never been thoroughly so since I was obliged to give it up." What attracts younger artists to Mr. Murphy's work is best captured by the opening entry in his first art notebook: "People dwarfed climbing seriously into great chairs to talk to each other; struggling under weight of a huge pencil to write notes on square feet of paper; Man's good-natured tussle with the giant material world: or Man's unconscious slavery to his material possessions." There is no question that Gerald and Sara Murphy loved each other. They were devoted to their children and to their friends. But as much as they sought a refuge from the conventions of their country and their privileged families, they were never completely able to escape. "They were survivors from World War I," John Donnelly said, referring to the Lost Generation. "They had come out lost. Between the slaughters and gassings they had seen their world turned upside down. Did they have an ethos? Something to draw them forward? Well, they had their art, but they were also heavy drinkers and very busy, trying to escape." Just before Mr. Murphy's death in 1964, Mr. Donnelly said, his grandparents burned a huge pile of letters in the driveway. He recalled that Mrs. Murphy had only one regret: "We forgot the stamps, to save for the grandchildren."

Life Among the Famous. Slide Show

Copyright by the New York Times 2007