Archived Edition: September 12, 2007 | Back to Current	Sep 10, 2010

Art patrons' whimsical collection shows at WCMA
Paul Reyns - Executive Editor

“I don’t care for his art,” one lady said to her friend as she walked away from a canvas covered with abstract, hard-edged forms. It was one of Gerald Murphy’s seven existing paintings on display at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) as part of the current exhibition called Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy. The disgruntled visitor then did something she wouldn’t often be able to do in an art museum: she moved on to look at the wedding dress of Sara Murphy – Gerald’s wife – and pictures of horses, sailboats and a soapbox car drawn by their children.

Fortunately for this visitor – and for the quality of the exhibition – there is more on WCMA’s walls than Gerald Murphy’s meticulous, restrained paintings. A great art patron, Murphy was himself an active painter from 1921 to 1929. He was influenced by Cubist forms, but developed a style that looked forward to Pop art. His works are rich with images of machinery and common objects. However, they are also very mechanical and largely dependent on graphic design principles. As a consequence, many seem more suited to the advertising world than the walls of an art museum.

Although the exhibition centers on these paintings (which had not been shown together since 1986), it is more concerned with the Murphys’ world, capturing how they grew up, how they enjoyed themselves and how they faced tragedy. Both Gerald and Sara were born into privileged families, married and eventually moved to Paris. They are perhaps most well-known for being at the center of a social circle of artists and writers in France in the early 20th century; their friends included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. Despite their exuberant lives and exalted social circle, however, the Murphys suffered during the Great Depression when they lost their two young sons. In this way, the exhibit moves through each period of the Murphys’ lives, seamlessly tying their stories and their own art with the art world that circled around them.

It makes superb sense to do what an educational museum such as WCMA has done with this exhibition, trying to place the art that the Murphys and their friends produced back into the emotional and social context from which it emerged. Not far from Gerald Murphy’s oil paintings, there are, for instance, quotations printed on the walls from the private correspondence of Sara Murphy; portraits of Gerald Murphy as a young man, trim, well-dressed and headed to Yale; and Sara Murphy’s wedding dress from 1915 displayed on a pedestal, its hand-made French lace and glass pearls symbolizing a life lived as art, or at least elevating the objects of life to art.

This is possibly the most fascinating aspect of the exhibition: the proximity of quotations, portraits, costume decor, and paintings, not to mention documentary film clips and home movies. Together these make visible, in a way, the confluence of social life, family history and art – not just the works of Gerald Murphy, but also paintings by Le Corbusier and others whom they influenced and who influenced them in the milieu of the French Riveria.

A display in one room of the three-room exhibition is, in some ways, typical of the exhibition. It holds the Murphys’ accessories from Cap d’Antibes, a resort town on the Mediterranean, including intricately decorated fans, a scarf, a cane, a photograph, and a black skull cap. In one sense, the objects seem entirely lifeless, no longer used, at rest in the closed-off display case. But WCMA has also given them a new vitality by putting them in the same room with paintings, where they seem not so much artifacts as art, infused with joy and tragedy.

The exhibition, curated by Deborah Rothschild, opened on July 8 and will close on Nov. 11.