Artists: The Seven-Year Itch

The life mold of Gerald Murphy hardly seemed likely to form an artist. Andover-prepped, Yale-educated, Skull and Bones-tapped, Murphy was elected the best-dressed man in the class of 1911. He was so handsome and rich that F. Scott Fitzgerald patterned Dick Diver, the golden-boy hero of Tender Is the Night, after him. For 22 years, until his retirement in 1956, Murphy was president of Fifth Avenue’s chic Mark Cross leather-goods store, which his father began. Until his death last week at 76, he never bought any modern art or hung anything more than one Leger in his house. But during one short period of his life, Gerald Murphy did ten paintings that by their precisionist style and representation of commonplace objects stunningly foreshadowed the best of today’s pop art.

Art of Living. Murphy fell into art backward. After a stint in U.S. Army aviation during World War I, he tried studying landscape architecture at Harvard-and found the required drawing course a dreadful bore. So he and his wife Sara sailed to the expatriate paradise of Europe. There, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, the Murphys became “masters in the art of living.” Since the wine and the wit were always right, Stravinsky came to dinner, Léger showed them Paris night life, and Diaghilev invited them to his ballet.

One day, in a gallery window, Murphy discovered the cubist masters. He took art lessons from Diaghilev’s designer, Natalia Goncharova, who would not let him paint anything recognizably real. Then he began to follow his own bent, meticulously rendering real objects in a bright, orderly manner. His first painting, Razor, done in 1922, was a heraldic crossing of a safety razor and a fountain pen below a matchbox, backed up by angular cubist meanderings. Another painting, 6 ft. by 6 ft., showed giant watchworks. Portrait detailed Murphy’s foot and its inky imprint, three true thumbprints, and a prototype profile of “Caucasian” man.

On Airplane Linen. By then, Léger had pronounced Murphy the only American painter in Paris. Murphy’a 18-ft.-high Boatdeck, Cunarder, an immense evocation of exile in hard-edge boldness, caused a row at the 1924 Salon des Indépendants because it took up almost all the space that U.S. artists were allotted. Murphy worked tirelessly in a technique as meticulous as his detail. He used airplane linen, painstakingly mocked up his drawing before he picked up a brush. A cigar-box lid in Cocktail (1928), which splays bartenders’ tools flat against the picture plane, took him four months to paint.

During the seven years that Murphy painted and thereafter, no honors, few shows and little comment came his way. In the big-league company of his good friends Picasso, Leger and Braque he perceived that he “was, not going to be first-rate,” so he quit art with the argument that he “couldn’t stand second— rate painting.” Just before he died, Murphy learned that his friend MacLeish had given his 1927 Wasp and Pear to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Murphy was greatly pleased; he had not known when he stopped painting that his art would ultimately help to link the bewildering present with the more settled past.