Docent Graduation Project

Linda Reiter

February, 2003.

Gerald Murphy, 1888 – 1964

Artist: 1922 – 1929

Only six canvasses, and photographs of three others, remain of Gerald Murphy’s short but remarkable career as an artist. One of the canvasses, Still Life, c. 1925 is part of the Tacoma Art Museum’s current exhibition, A Transatlantic Avant-Garde: Americans in Paris 1918 – 1939. This small painting of a vase that holds two flowers and a trailing vine is not dramatic, but it is worth taking time to investigate.

Gerald Murphy began to paint at the age of 34. Although he graduated from Yale in 1912 and later studied landscape design at Harvard, he did not begin to study painting until moving to Paris in 1921. French cubism was by this time beginning to yield to purism and precisionism. Those influences are displayed in his work. Still Life depicts a two-handled vase containing 2 stemmed flowers and a trailing vine of leaves. It uses the cubist technique of viewing an object from several angles in two dimensions. But, instead of the cubist style of showing different aspects of many parts of the object at once, leaving the viewer to guess the object, the subject is clearly represented. Murphy painted the entire length of the vase from different angles. Each image is a separate solid pastel color overlapping the next, but the edges of each form are very crisp and distinct from the others. The pastel colors almost make the multiple overlapping forms look like shadows of the central figure.

The vase contains two different flowers, balancing each other on opposite sides. They are clearly identifiable as flowers with long stems, but appear to be composites of many different kinds of flowers. They are illustrated by separate but overlapping shapes with crisp edges in soft vibrant colors. The vase and flowers are portrayed by familiar outlines, but there is no detail, only overlapping shapes with crisp edges in pastel colors. The trailing vine, at first glance, appears to be incongruous with the rest of the painting because it is painted in shades of clear green and white with botanical details such as veins and serrated edges. However, upon closer inspection, the vine, too is a composite. Although the leaves are carefully balanced along the vine, they are composed of aspects of different types of leaves: serrated, rounded, mottled, solid. These, too, have precise, crisp edges so that each aspect of each leaf is distinct. This work appears to incorporate several “isms”, including cubism, precisionism, impressionism, and seems to be an attempt to represent an entire bouquet of flowers in simplest form.

As talented as he clearly was, Gerald Murphy was not acknowledged as an important American artist until after his death when, in 1972, the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited his work in a one-man show. He and his wife Sara were, however, important in the artistic social circle in France between 1922 and 1929. They had close and well-documented friendships with such luminaries as Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemmingway, John Dos Pasos, Archibald MacLeish, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In fact, Fitzgerald made clear that the description of his characters in Tender is the Night, Dick and Nichole Diver was based on Gerald and Sara Murphy (although Sara denied any similarity). So why was Gerald Murphy’s own artistic career so short and unheralded? It is sometimes said that Murphy abruptly left Paris when the stock market crashed in 1929. . . but that had little to do with his decision to abandon painting. To comprehend what happened, we need to understand a little about why the Murphys went to France and how they lived while they were there.

Gerald Murphy was the second son of demanding, critical, and unsympathetic parents: Patrick Frances Murphy, who built the Mark Cross company from a harness maker to a retailer of fine accessories and personal items, and Anna, who was so pious in her Catholic faith that she changed Gerald’s real birthdate, March 26, 1888 to March 25th to coincide with the Feast of the Assumption. Although he had a brother and sister, Gerald was not close to either of them as they spent most of their early years in different boarding schools. Gerald was a poor student, and his parents often reminded him that they were disappointed. However, what he lacked in academic ability, he more than made up in creativity and social and organizational skills. At Yale, he managed the glee club, joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and was even inducted into Yale’s exclusive and secretive Skull and Bones society which is limited to fifteen members of each graduating class. He was voted “best dressed” and “most thorough gentleman” in the class of 1912. His journals, though, show that he felt he was playing a part and he began suffering bouts of depression that he referred to as the “Black Service”. His father made it clear that he felt Gerald’s social skills and creative bent had no practical value and that he was expected to enter his father’s business when he graduated from Yale. And he did.

Gerald met Sara Wiborg when he was 16 and she was 21. Sara was one of three beautiful and very privileged daughters of a wealthy Ohio industrialist, Frank Wiborg. Their mother loved entertaining and greatly enjoyed the attention that her daughters attracted. She traveled with them extensively and each of the girls was “presented at (British) court”, the ultimate status symbol of the times. Mrs. Wiborg did not encourage young men to court her daughters and the girls did not socialize unchaperoned. In that Victorian era, adult children of privilege were expected to do as they were told and the Wiborg girls dutifully stayed near their mother until Sara was over thirty years old. As a teenager, Gerald befriended the sisters when the families both had summer homes on Long Island in New York. Mrs. Murphy apparently never considered him a potential suitor because she allowed him to visit freely and over the following eleven years, he and Sara maintained a steady correspondence. They shared a common love of art, music, and literature and eventually found they shared a vision of how life should be lived.

In 1915, they told their families that they wanted to marry. Neither family was pleased and it was months before they were allowed to announce their engagement. Both families tried to dissuade them, but their letters during this period make it clear that nothing could have changed their minds. They were very much in love and both wanted very much to be free of their parents’ control. They were married in December of 1916.

When World War I began in 1917, Gerald joined the service but was not deployed overseas. After the war, he studied drawing at the School of Design and Liberal Arts, and landscape design at Harvard. By 1921, the Murphys had three children: a daughter, Honoria and two sons, Baoth and Patrick. Their letters and journals show that they still shared a vision of living a simple life of artistic pursuit; but their concept of a simple life was expensive and they were still dependent upon their families for support.

When Frank Wiborg retired, he divided his estate among his daughters and himself. In 1921, the income from his bequest freed the Murphys to move to France where the American dollar was so strong that even people of modest means could live very well. . . and their means were somewhat more than modest.

Almost immediately after they arrived, Gerald was so inspired by the work of the French cubists that he decided to learn to paint. He and Sara both took lessons from a Russian abstract painter, Natalia Goncharova. They painted for hours each day and progressed so quickly that, within months, Goncharova recommended them to the director of the Ballet Russes to help restore some damaged sets designed by artists Braque, Derain, and Picasso. The work involved climbing up and down thirty-foot ladders and painting with long handled broom-like brushes. Through this experience, they met the artists whose work they were restoring and were introduced to others. Three years later, they put their experience to work when Gerald designed the sets and Sara helped design the costumes for a ballet called “Within the Quota” that was performed by the Swedish Ballet Company. Cole Porter, Gerald’s friend from Yale wrote the score. Gerald also created a sensation in 1924 when he submitted an enormous, 18 by 12 foot painting of the deck, smokestacks, steam pipes and rigging of an ocean liner at an exhibition of independent artists in Paris. It seems likely that his set painting experience may have inspired the scale of his work because many of Murphy’s paintings used enlarged scale, such as a detailed enlargement of the workings of a clock in Watch, 1925

Although Murphy maintained a studio in both Paris and Antibes, he only completed about two paintings per year. The Murphy’s social life was the most important part of their lives and they spent much of their time traveling. Their daughter, Honoria, reported in her biography of her parents, that she crossed the Atlantic sixteen times during her childhood. The Murphy’s home near the Mediterranean Sea, Villa America, became legendary as a gathering place for their friends. These friends often brought their families with them to Villa America where the Murphys planned elaborate activities and hosted lavish parties for both children and adults. Their life during those years was truly idyllic. Gerald and Sara renovated the villa, planted extensive gardens, swam every day, sailed, hosted parties. Most of all, they played with their children who were not sent to school, but had tutors who lived and traveled with them. Gerald and Sara reveled in the life they had always dreamed of.

Then, in 1929, their idyll abruptly ended when their youngest child, Patrick, contracted tuberculosis. Antibiotics were unknown then, and tuberculosis was nearly always fatal. Gerald Murphy never painted again after Patrick became ill. His “invented life” was over. Villa America was closed, the older children were put in boarding schools, and the Murphys moved with Patrick to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Switzerland until 1932 when they returned to the United States. Patrick died in 1937, but in a particularly cruel twist of fate, his brother Baoth died first in 1935,of spinal meningitis.

The market crash of 1929 took a toll on Sara’s Trust, and when they returned to the United States, the Mark Cross Company was in crisis. Gerald Murphy became president of the company in 1934. Although he was never happy in that role, the company survived and prospered during the twenty years he occupied the office.

It is remarkable, actually, that there are six remaining canvasses, because when Gerald Murphy quit painting in 1929, he showed no further interest in it, saying he could never be a first rate artist. Because he declined to even list his works, historians are unsure about the total number he completed.

In 1974, The Museum of Modern Art in New York produced a one-man exhibition of Murphy’s paintings. A review published in Newsweek magazine read, “Murphy tried as a man and artist to rise above the bumptious culture in which he lived. He failed, of course, in life. In art, he did it, briefly, intensely, and completely.”

Bibliography:

Donnelly, Honoria Murphy, with Richard N. Billings. Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After. New York: Times Books, 1982.

Rotily, Jocelyn. ”A picture of America by Gerald Murphy”, American Artists in Paris 1918-1939 A Transatlantic Avant-Garde. Berkely: University of California Press, 2003 *

Vaill, Amanda. Everybody Was So Young. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998

* Source found in Tacoma Art Museum Resource Center