Visual Arts

Even though it happened in France, it was all somehow an American experience."

That is how Gerald Murphy described the life that he and wife Sara made for themselves during the 1920s, that high point for American expatriates who became known as the Lost Generation. Their lives, their friends and the art they made is the focus of "Making It New: The Art and Style of Gerald and Sara Murphy," opening today at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Both husband and wife came from the privileged world of immigrant families who grew wealthy in the latter part of the 19th century.

Gerald's father bought a Philadelphia saddlery shop that he moved to New York City and developed into the premiere luxury goods store Mark Cross. It was an institution his youngest son disparaged as a "monument to the nonessential."

Sara was a Wiborg from Cincinnati. The family became wealthy in the printer's ink business, and her socially ambitious mother kept her three beautiful and gifted daughters largely in Europe, grooming them as potential matches for aristocracy. She could not have been too pleased when Sara chose to marry Gerald, five years her junior and distinguished neither academically nor in business.

When Gerald Murphy failed to complete his studies in landscape architecture, the couple traveled to Paris and reinvented themselves. After World War I, the American dollar went far in Europe, and the couple was able to live in style on Sara's modest inherited income. Their apartment in Paris was a model of modern design that immediately attracted the attention of Parisian society. But it was when Gerald saw his first modern paintings in the window of a Parisian art gallery that he experienced "a shock of recognition that put me into an entirely new orbit."

Both husband and wife began to take painting lessons that led them into the circle of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. They painted sets for Diaghilev, but more important they met, and apparently charmed, everyone – Picasso, Hemingway, the Steins. Those who credit the Murphys, along with Gerald's college friend Cole Porter, with having "invented the French Riviera," know that they are exaggerating. But it was after the Murphys established themselves in the home they anointed Villa America in Antibes that the Riviera was transformed from a winter retreat for Northern Europeans to a year-round destination for American expatriates and the European avant-garde.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a frequent guest, modeled Dick and Nicole Diver, the lead characters of Tender Is the Night, on them. Picasso and Fernand Léger painted them and their three children. Man Ray took their photographs. Sara, who wore pearls even when she sunbathed, organized picnics and boating trips. Judging from the photographs at the DMA, there was a great deal of dressing up and horsing around on the beach. As their friend the poet Archibald MacLeish described them, "They were masters of the art of living."

And all this time Gerald was painting the handful of works that are the centerpiece of "Making It New." When he exhibited in the annual Parisian salon exhibitions, his paintings were a sensation, totally unlike anything produced at the time.

Whether he was depicting a cocktail shaker or the inner workings of a watch, he did so with meticulous precision and a design sense that drew from both the avant-garde and advertising. His painting of a safety razor, a fountain pen and a matchbox is a mystifying, heraldic emblem that has since been considered everything from an example of American precisionist painting to a work of pop art 40 years ahead of its time.

Recent scholarship has revealed much coded, personal symbolism in Gerald's seemingly matter-of-fact subject matter, and there is no question but that in the few years he painted he moved toward increasingly personal imagery.

But in 1929, Gerald stopped painting. Patrick, their oldest child, came down with tuberculosis that year, and the family moved to Switzerland. The stock market crash wiped out most of Sara's income, and the family sold all their European property and eventually returned to New York, where Gerald took over Mark Cross. In 1935 they suffered the unimaginable tragedy of losing both their sons when Patrick succumbed to tuberculosis and another child died suddenly of meningitis.

They were living their later years under reduced circumstances in upstate New York when an event in Dallas in 1960 brought Gerald's art to renewed attention. Douglas MacAgy, the director of the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art, which merged with the DMA, mounted an exhibition titled "American Genius in Review" and included several of his paintings. "I have been discovered," the 72-year-old wrote to a friend. "What does one wear?"

"Making It New" gives us a chance to see almost the complete work of Mr. Murphy alongside the cubist and abstract work by Picasso, Léger and others who inspired him. But it is the wealth of photographs, restored home movies and letters that bring to life a time that still seems magical in its creative energy.

"There was such affection between everybody," Sara remembered later. "It was like a great fair, and everybody was so young."

Charles Dee Mitchell is a Dallas freelance writer.

"Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" opens today and continues through Sept. 14 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood at Ross. $16, $14 seniors, $12 students with ID. This ticketed exhibition includes general admission to museum and an audio tour of the Murphy exhibition. DMA members and children younger than 12 get in free and may purchase the audio tour for $4. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays through Sundays and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays. 214-922-1200, www.dallasmuseumofart.org.All images © Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.