The Cultural Influence Of Gerald And Sara Murphy

NEW HAVEN — Sara and Gerald Murphy are best remembered as the captivating American expatriates who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. A new exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery, “Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” is the first to explore the couple’s relationships with some of the pivotal figures in avant-garde circles in Paris in the 1920s. Their legendary style — modern in its apparent simplicity and freedom from stifling social regimentation — was a touchstone for many artists, writers, and musicians of the period — among them their friends Fitzgerald, Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Serge Diaghilev, and Jean Cocteau.

Gerald Murphy was brilliant and inventive painter, recognized by contemporary French critics for his American audacity. Although he produced just a small body of work, many of his images anticipate Pop Art.

His seven surviving canvases have been brought together in New Haven for the first time with paintings, watercolors, drawings, and photographs by artists within his circle — Picasso, Leger, Juan Gris, and Amedee Ozenfant. Also included are a series of watercolors dedicated to Gerald and Sara by Leger; and photographs of the Murphy family and its circle by Man Ray. Personal photographs, home movies, letters and other memorabilia reveal the warmth, charm, and charisma of the family, and further bring this dynamic era to life.

Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery states: “Sara and Gerald Murphy’s ever apparent love of art and life inspired all those who came in contact with them. During their now legendary decade spent abroad in Paris and on the French Riviera, the young American couple’s remarkable social graces and intellectual curiosities created a circle of friendships that helped fuel creative interactions among many artists whose work was then boldly expanding the boundaries of visual art, theater, music, dance, and literature. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to view all of Gerald Murphy’s surviving paintings within the context of a great modernist moment in time and the art of his illustrious peers.”

“Making It New” was organized by the William College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Mass. Its presentation at the Yale University Art Gallery has been organized by Helen A. Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture.

In keeping with the Murphys’ spirit of collaboration, numerous music groups on Yale University’s campus are including pieces from the 1920s in their regular schedule. Check the gallery’s website, ArtGallery.yale.edu, for details.

The Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque Memorial Symposium, “‘A Freshly Invented World’: Art and Innovation in the 1920s,” will be offered on Saturday, April 12, from 9:15 am to 5 pm, with a keynote lecture given on Friday, April 11, at 5:30 pm, by Wanda Corn, the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, edited by Deborah Rothschild and published by the Williams College Museum of Art and the University of California Press, available at the Gallery’s Bookstore.

Following its presentation at the Yale University Art Gallery, “Making It New” will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art (June 1 to September 14).

Located at 1111 Chapel Street in New Haven, the gallery is open to the public free of charge: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm (Thursday until 8 pm, September to June); and Sunday, 1 pm. For additional information, visit ArtGallery.yale.edu or call 203-432-0600.