Gerald Murphy

A prominent figure and multi-talented artist of the Lost Generation of Avant- Garde Americans in Paris in the 1920s, Gerald Murphy was known for painting everyday objects in flat, unmodulated colors. He later said that he was "nourished on Leger's Picasso's Braque's and Gris' abstractions." He worked painstakingly, producing only a handful of finished works over a period of years. He fostered creative friendships with many leading figures of that time including Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, and Archibald MacLeish. He and his wife Sara were the real life models for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night." He became a painter of considerable gifts but only began studying art in 1921 at age 33 after a career in business. His teacher was Natalia Goncharova, a Russian abstract painter who insisted that her students could commit nothing to canvas that resembled reality. He also painted sets for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. However, in 1929 when his son was stricken with tuberculosis, Murphy quit painting, and he had produced only about a dozen meticulously crafted assemblages and a few watercolors. He never sold any of them, and they were forgotten until the 1950s when they were rediscovered. A posthumous exhibit was held at the New York Museum of Modern Art and in 1995 at the Whitney Museum. The Whitney bought one of his assemblages, "Cocktail," from that exhibit and paid more than one million dollars.

Gerald Murphy Images:
Cocktail, 1927