Gerald and Sara Murphy took Paris by storm in the 1920’s, inserting themselves into the avant-garde circles of dance, music, and art. They also tried to make art out of their own lives. They embodied a predominant theme of the 1920’s: life as one would like it to be versus life as it is.
With my obsession of Paris in the 1920’s going full steam ahead, I recently ordered “Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy” from Chapters/Indigo. The book comes on the heels of a Murphy Exhibit that is currently taking place at Yale University.
I’d like to preface that I really wanted to see the exhibit firsthand, but being unable to for several reasons, the book based on it had to suffice. It did not disappoint. It is multi-media and contains a wonderful collection of essays that examine through images and text the artistic life and style of the famous “Murphy’s”. The book delighted me to no end, to the point where I’ve reread it several times in a few weeks. Like eating a box of chocolates, I ate all of them wishing that I’d saved some for later.
The world the couple inhabited as expatriates in France included writers Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, John Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker. They also communed with artists Picasso, Leger, Man Ray and Cole Porter. Both Murphy’s painted sets for the Ballet Russes until Gerald, walking down the rue de la Boetie, saw in the window of a gallery, pictures of Picasso and Braque and Juan Gris. Astounded by their paintings, and never having seen modern paintings, he immediately turned to his wife Sara and said, “If this is painting, then this is what I want to do.” Today, Murphy’s paintings are in the Museum of Modern Art.
It was through Cole Porter that Sara & Gerald Murphy discovered the French Riviera well before the Cote d’Azure became a Mecca for the glitterati. They were also the first to embrace modern architecture with their sparsely decorated Moorish home, Villa America, in Antibes, the first of its kind to feature a rooftop sundeck for sunbathing.
The Murphy’s were so intimately entwined and enchanted with each other that their friends referred to them as “the Murphy’s” rather than just Sara or Gerald. It is interesting to discover that during their heyday in the mid-nineteen twenties they were already well into middle age. I was struck that these artistic pioneers were the first Boomers with zip!
After the tragic deaths of their two sons, Sara & Gerald put all of their efforts into recreating a new life with several beautiful homes they began to renovate. The first, Cheer Hall in Sneden’s Landing and later, Swan Cove in East Hampton, New York. These divine homes, in particular Cheer Hall on the Hudson, were outfitted according to historic research meticulously and diligently uncovered by Gerald. Sara tended to her gardens in order to give her life some beauty and meaning as she coped with her grief. In a letter dated to his wife in 1936, Gerald wrote:
“Outside of a man and a woman, and children, and a house, and a garden—there’s nothing much.”
Inventing a beautiful life in the face of tragedy, is without doubt a current Boomer philosophy, but Gerald Murphy articulated it. He was fond of saying, “As we grow older we must guard against a feeling of lowered consequence.” How many of us are facing this, with personal losses and a need to bring beauty and gentleness into our lives. Reading the Murphy story is a reminder of how to live well and elegantly with diminished circumstances.
In an essay from “The Making of Style”, Linda Patterson Miller brilliantly points out that at first, Fitzgerald’s portrait of Dick Diver in his novel Tender Is the Night” irked Murphy. He felt Fitzgerald didn’t get it right. However, in its anticipation of life’s complications smothering a dream, Gerald fully realized how Fitzgerald discovered, with awful clarity, the prominent theme of his and Sara’s real-life story. He told Fitzgerald in 1935:
“You are the only person to whom I can ever tell the bleak truth of what I feel…I know now that what you said in Tender is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life- the unreal part- has had any scheme any beauty.”
The Murphy’s are the precursors of the Boomer concept of living well in the face of adversity. I highly recommend this book as a shining example to those of us who are aging and are feeling of “lowered consequence”. The Murphy life story points out that the boat can sail again, albeit in a different direction and can carry us to a different and perhaps, serene Port.
