Gerald Clery Murphy

Background

Gerald C. Murphy was born on March 25, 1888, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Patrick Francis Murphy, I, who in the 1890's established the Mark Cross Company, a fashionable leather-goods and import store, and of Anna Elizabeth Ryan.

Education

Murphy spent five years working for the family company following his graduation from Yale in 1912, but he soon acquired a distaste for the conventional business life and decided in 1918, following a short stint in the U. S. Signal Corps, to study at the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture.

Career

When Murphy completed his two-year landscape program, he went in early 1921 to England, where he studied the celebrated formal gardens. Then he traveled to France, where he chose to live. Like other expatriates of the day, he had decided that only in France were the arts alive.

Murphy found the artistic fervor of Paris in the 1920's so engaging, in fact, that he forgot landscaping and began a nine-year career as a painter. He helped to paint sets for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, and he studied art under one of Diaghilev's designers, Natalia Goncharova. When Fernand Léger commissioned Murphy in 1923 to create an "American" ballet for the Ballets Suédois, a Swedish company performing in Paris, Murphy collaborated with another Yale man, Cole Porter, on Within the Quota, a short ballet that won acclaim both in Paris and later on a two-month tour of America. Its lively tunes and Murphy's story line and stage sets - huge backdrops bearing a collage of newspaper headlines - satirized an immigrant's stereotypical impressions of America.

Murphy had completed three paintings by 1924, and when the Salon des Indépendants in Paris exhibited Razor (1923), Boatdeck, Cunarder (1924), and Engine Room (1924), Léger hailed him as "the only American painter in Paris. " Murphy described his own style as a merger between the real and the abstract. He hoped to "digest" real objects, he said, "along with purely abstract forms and re-present them. " His admiration for the exactitude of the fifteenth-century painter Piero della Francesca inspired him to render everyday objects in large scale with meticulous precision. He set up studios in Paris and on the French Riviera, where he worked on his canvases with painstaking slowness, sometimes at the rate of only one painting a year. Some contemporary artists and critics dismissed Murphy's work as that of a wealthy dilettante, but as art critic Rudi Blesh has recognized, his semi-abstract canvases were "so complex in design, so meticulous in craft, and (some of them) so heroic in size (one is ten feet wide and over seventeen feet high) that their production could not have been without protracted or concentrated labor. "

During 1923 and 1924 Murphy renovated a villa in Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera that soon became the gathering spot for prominent writers and artists. He developed what became close and lifelong relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway. Murphy had a profound influence on these writers, inspiring such works as MacLeish's "Sketch for a Portrait of Mme. G M. " and "American Letter, for Gerald Murphy, " and Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, in which the main characters of Dick and Nicole Diver were patterned after Gerald and his wife, Sara Murphy, as Fitzgerald knew them in France.

Throughout the latter half of the 1920's Murphy continued to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants: Watch and Doves in 1925, Roulement â Billes and Bibliothéque in 1926, Wasp and Pear in 1927, and Cocktail in 1928. His final painting, Portrait (1929), a starkly segmented collage that bore precise images of his foot, three thumbprints, and one enlarged eye, foreshadowed the personal fragmentation of his life during the 1930's.

Murphy had to return, reluctantly, to New York in 1933 to rescue the Mark Cross Company from bankruptcy, and his two sons died of illness in 1935 and 1937.

In 1929, when his younger son, Patrick, contracted the tuberculosis that killed him eight years later, Murphy devoted himself to the boy's struggle for health and put aside painting forever. He said later that he was not happy until he had begun painting and never entirely happy after he was "obliged to give it up. " Murphy's role as "a kind of minor literary figure" or as a patron of artists tended later to overshadow his real importance as an artist - one who, as MacLeish said, "painted some of the most innovative canvases of those years. " When the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune exhibited most of his works in 1936, it brought Murphy some of the recognition due him as an artist, but he had taken up the Mark Cross Company as his personal burden, and he never put it down again.

Although he cleared the company of debt during the 1930's and made it a thriving concern during the 1940's and 1950's, he never found the work congenial, and was happy to retire in 1956. Murphy felt heartened to learn prior to his death on October 17, 1964, in East Hampton, New York, that his few works had experienced a renaissance of sorts.

Achievements

• The painter, Gerald Clery Murphy was wealthy, expatriate American who moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century and who, with his generous hospitality and flair for parties, created a vibrant social circle, particularly in the 1920s, that included a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation.

Connections

On December 30, 1915, Gerald C. Murphy married Sara Sherman Wiborg; they had three children.

Father:

Patrick Francis Murphy, I

Mother:

Anna Elizabeth Murphy (Ryan)

Sister:

Esther Arthur (Murphy)

Esther Arthur (Murphy) was an American intellectual, historian, conversationalist and socialite.

Wife:

Sara Sherman Murphy (Wiborg)

Daughter:

Honoria Adeline Donnelly (Murphy)

colleague:

Cole Albert Porter

Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter.

Son:

Patrick Francis Murphy, II

Son:

Baoth Wiborg Murphy

Brother:

Frederic Timothy Murphy

Friend:

John Roderigo Dos Passos

John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist active in the first half of the twentieth century.

Friend:

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American fiction writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age.

Friend:

Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish was an American poet and writer, who was associated with the modernist school of poetry.

Friend:

Ernest Miller Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist.

References

• Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After
• Americans in Paris (1921-1931): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder
• Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy
• The paintings of Gerald Murphy
• Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends
• Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story