Monday, March 24, 2008
In June 1921, Gerald and Sara Murphy and their three children sailed to France. They planned a tour of European gardens related to Gerald's study of landscape architecture. But in Europe, instead of grand gardens, the couple found fecund ground for personal reinvention.
In Paris, Gerald became captivated by cubism. " was a shock of recognition which put me into an entirely new orbit," he said after visiting avant-garde art galleries. He rapidly gained fame as a distinctly American cubist painter, developing in seven years a small body of paintings now regarded as major works of American modernism.
At the same time, he and Sara enthralled their new artist friends with their genius for transforming daily life into art. Fernand Léger's watercolors chronicled their summers on the Cote d'Azur. Pablo Picasso celebrated their seaside idylls with drawings that rendered Sara and her companions as classical figures.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the Murphys' gift for friendships encouraged artistic breakthroughs and inspired major literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and John Dos Passos. "Many of their friends remembered their time with the Murphys as the best years of their lives," says Deborah Rothschild, senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art.
Rothschild has created the first exhibition to explore the pivotal contribution of the Murphys to the emergence of modernism, "aking It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy." The NEH-funded exhibition opens July 8 at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and later will travel to the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven and the Dallas Museum of Art.
The exhibition juxtaposes more than eighty artworks with approximately two hundred pieces of memorabilia. Amid paintings by Gerald, Picasso, Leger, Juan Gris, Le Corbusier, and others are manuscripts, letters, home movies, and photographs of family and friends.
In Paris, Gerald became captivated by cubism. " was a shock of recognition which put me into an entirely new orbit," he said after visiting avant-garde art galleries. He rapidly gained fame as a distinctly American cubist painter, developing in seven years a small body of paintings now regarded as major works of American modernism.
At the same time, he and Sara enthralled their new artist friends with their genius for transforming daily life into art. Fernand Léger's watercolors chronicled their summers on the Cote d'Azur. Pablo Picasso celebrated their seaside idylls with drawings that rendered Sara and her companions as classical figures.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the Murphys' gift for friendships encouraged artistic breakthroughs and inspired major literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and John Dos Passos. "Many of their friends remembered their time with the Murphys as the best years of their lives," says Deborah Rothschild, senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art.
Rothschild has created the first exhibition to explore the pivotal contribution of the Murphys to the emergence of modernism, "aking It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy." The NEH-funded exhibition opens July 8 at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and later will travel to the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven and the Dallas Museum of Art.
The exhibition juxtaposes more than eighty artworks with approximately two hundred pieces of memorabilia. Amid paintings by Gerald, Picasso, Leger, Juan Gris, Le Corbusier, and others are manuscripts, letters, home movies, and photographs of family and friends.
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