Art Review: Idyll Rich

by David Brickman, August 24, 2007

It is not unusual to think of wealthy people as collectors of art. And it’s well known that patrons often aim to influence artists and their creations. But to think that a rich, young American couple could have inspired great art in a variety of media on two continents, not by collecting or commissioning, but through the sheer force of their personalities and lifestyle, is almost beyond imagination.

That’s the remarkable story told in “Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” at the Williams College Museum of Art. The Murphys were Jazz Age royalty. Born into mercantile fortunes, they broke free of convention to become international lifestyle innovators on a grand scale. They were part of the expatriate scene of Americans who moved to France in the 1920s, where they counted as their closest friends Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and John Dos Passos. F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled Nicole and Dick Diver, the protagonists of Tender is the Night, on the Murphys, and then dedicated the novel to them. The couple wrote and designed the first American jazz ballet in 1923, and had the then-unknown Cole Porter compose music for it. Their fondness for jazz led them to import the latest recordings from the United States, which they shared with, among others, Igor Stravinsky.

A number of paintings by Picasso were directly influenced, if not outright inspired, by Sara’s physical beauty and personal magnetism; another clearly depicts Gerald as a panpiper’s companion. In 1923, the Murphys singlehandedly created the summer beach culture on the French Riviera, when they convinced the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes to remain open past May so that they and the Picassos could live there for the summer.

The exhibit was curated by WCMA’s Deborah Rothschild, who organized the provocative “Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1903-1913,” in 2002. Like the earlier show, “Making It New” is not so much an art exhibition as it is cultural history illustrated by an enormous collection of objects, many of which happen to be great works of art. Hundreds of artifacts, from scrapbooks to costumes, detail the Murphys’ background, courtship, married life, European period, etc., broken into 13 distinct sections. It becomes a bit of a job just to get through it all (I counted more than 100 framed pictures in one of the rooms), but this is academia, after all, where exhaustive research must be served. There are times, though, when the viewer would prefer the cultivated simplicity the Murphys were famous for.