[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: August 17, 2007]
I'd like to catch up with Gerald Murphy. His paintings, I mean, or what's left of them. Yes, happily we have the uncanny "Wasp and Pear" at MOMA (I don't know if it's travelling with this show*), but I don't know when else one will get to see the half a dozen or so works which survive.
Gerald Murphy didn't take his talent as an artist seriously. He had, as is well known, a serious talent for living, which he shared with his glamorous wife and full-time muse to Modernism, Sara. Sara and Gerald opened the doors of their Villa America on the Cap d'Antibes both to the American writers and artists of the so-called "Lost Generation", as well as host of European lions - Picasso and Léger foremost among them.
Scions of wealthy merchant families, Gerald and Sara became emblematic patrons of the gilded 1920s, friends of the Fitzgeralds and Cole Porter. In a recent New Yorker article I thought fairly weak, Peter Schjeldahl repeats the common assumption that Gerald and Sara "figure as the charismatic Dick and Nicole Diver" in Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night. Not so. As a more critical look at comments by Murphy, and Fitzgerald himself - not to mention the novel - would reveal, while the Riviera setting for the Divers' champagne days is clearly inspired by the Villa America milieu, the actual characters of Dick and Nicole depart quickly from what we know of the Murphys. Murphy himself recognized, at the least, a strong admixture of Scott and Zelda in the characters.
Curiously, the sensitive 1962 New Yorker profile of the Murphys by Calvin Tomkins - "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" - gets this brutally right, and it's currently available online, alongside the Schjeldahl piece. Fitzgerald does not emerge well from the account. The story of Gerald and Sara (whatever the speculation about his sexuality) was a love story, ending in Murphy's quietly dignified management of the troubled family business back in the States. The story of the Divers is a miserable mess.
As well as the Calvin Tomkins piece, another good source on the Murphys and their circle is Charles Riley's wonderful illustrated account of The Jazz Age in France. The latter surveys the period: an introductory chapter on the Murphys is followed by strong accounts of Hemingway, Dos Passos and Cummings, of Josephine Baker and the nightclub scenes, and of African American artists who left the United States for French exile - Tanner, Johnson, Woodruff. The volume has first-rate illustrations, and I mention it particularly because I have recently seen stacks of copies remaindered at $15.95, upstairs at the Broadway branch of Strand Books. That is a steal.
Almost concealed, though, by this panache of fine living (and fine dressing; in photographs, Gerald Murphy challenges the Duke of Windsor for patterned innovation) is the germ of a great painter. As Schjeldahl writes, the "paintings are a gold standard that backs, with creative integrity, the paper money of the couple's legend". Murphy's output was tiny - apparently fourteen canvasses in the 1920s, half of them casually lost. He underestimated himself, stopping painting because "I was not going to be first rate, and I couldn't stand second-rate painting." His reaction to a later show of his work: "I've been discovered. What does one wear?"
Contrary to Schjeldahl, his style, rather than being"prescient of big-scale abstraction and Pop art" is best regarded as part of an analytical abstract movement, well-represented by Stuart Davis, for example, which was washed aside by the tidal wave of Abstract Expressionism.
Some call Stuart Davis a Pop artist, in his later work. On the contrary, few painters seem more coolly cerebral; more detached from a fascination with the surface ornamentation of popular culture. Everday "pop" artefacts - cigarette packs, street signs - are the pretext for the meticulous exploratory dissection of pictorial space. See, for example, the transformation of his 1928 work "Rue Lipp" into the two works of the late fifties, "The Paris Bit" and "Study for the Paris Bit". A second glance at Murphy's slim output is surely enough to register the extreme control, the fearless dismantling of familiar images, and indeed the psychological tension in paintings like "Watch", "Razor" and the famous "Wasp". "Cocktail" expresses a world. And his work, unlike Davis's, remains figurative.
If anything, his precise forms, clean colors, and tenderness for the machine, share something with Léger - again, like Picasso, at heart a figurative painter.
Murphy, like Davis and Georgia O'Keefe, is one of the American painters shoved almost literally to one side by MOMA (they hang by an escalator), as a distraction from the master narrative which leads from Cezanne to Cubism and then to Pollock's break with Picasso. There are other stories in American art, and Gerald Murphy's is one of them.
I don't know how or when, but I need to catch up with Gerald Murphy.
*"Making it New; the Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" is at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts through November 11 (et voila), 2007; it then travels to Yale University Art Gallery (February 26-May 4, 2008) and to the Dallas Museum of Art (June 8-September 14, 2008). Murphy's paintings are shown alongside selections by relevant contemporaries.
All of the paintings mentioned above, as well as photographs of the Murphys, can currently be found at The New Yorker's site. This article can be discussed at Mouthfulsfood, right here.
