Gerald was also an intriguing, and significant painter. His work and their life during the 1920s, which some cultural critics have called the most creative decade in western culture since the Renaissance, are the subject of an exhibition, Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, at the Yale University Art Gallery.

When they came to Europe in 1921 to get away from wealthy parents trying to exert stifling control, the Murphys were already loaded with good taste, infectious sociability, and enough money to make a splash. They were by no means the richest Americans in Paris, and later on the Riviera. But they knew people.

Soon the circle they established included ex-pat writers and young avante garde painters such as Hemingway, Picasso and Leger. The latter’s work, Still Life (1925), is over the shoulder of exhibition organizer Helen Cooper, the gallery’s Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture. Leger, Picasso, and other pals prompted Gerald to try painting himself.

The results, such as Razor (1924), pictured below, knocked the socks off the French, who were primed to love things American. Murphy followed the artistic nostrum to create based on what one knows. As the scion of the Mark Cross fortune, he knew razors and fountain pens all right (and had even designed some real ones himself), but not ones three feet long and so inviting, yet sign-like at the same time, you want to reach into the painting to touch the handle grip.

Curator Robin Frank (pictured) suggested Murphy might have been making a nodding reference to autobiography with the way he “crosses” the Gillette Safety Razor over the Parker Big Red Duofold Fountain Pen, and then has the Three Star Safety Matches look protectively down upon them.

All three items were new American technology at the time, and Murphy transformed them into art, a harbinger of 1970s Pop Art. He called the work a new kind of still life, “American made and of heroic scale.”

There were only 13 paintings that he did in the decade, the work cut short by the tragic death of two sons and the Great Depression. The exhibition brings together the six extant paitnings, including Watch, of 1925. Based on the innards from Mark Cross-designed railroad time pieces, this one, said Curatorial Assistant Amy Tolbert (pictured below with a photograph of a now lost earlier work, the monumental, eighteen foot Boat Deck), is a kind of modernism with an American spin, a meditation on the pieces of time that just don’t add up.

Based on the innards from Mark Cross-designed railroad time pieces, this one, said Curatorial Assistant Amy Tolbert (pictured with a photograph of a now lost earlier work, the monumental, eighteen foot Boat Deck), is a kind of modernism with an American spin, a meditation on the pieces of time that just don’t add up.

In addition to the paintings, there are so many touching letters, memorabilia, and fascinating restored films of the Murphys cavorting with the Picassos, Dos Passos, the Cole Porters (a Yale friend) and essentially the who’s who of modernism on the beach, that the experience is a kind of pleasing tug back and forth between appreciating the art and a vicarious celebration of the joys of family, friendship, and creativity and how the triumph of a life, even one scarred by the early death of children, can combine all three.

One of the many pleasures of the exhibition is seeing the Murphys’ friends, such as the playwright Philip Barry and poet Archibald MacLeish, in new lights themselves. Barry is said to have commented that watching Gerald Murphy make a drink — he also introduced mixed drinks to the French set — was akin to looking at a priest at the altar.

Back in the U.S. to rescue the family business, Gerald Murphy never picked up a brush again. In 1960, when the fledgling Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art included him in an exhibition resurrecting six little-known artists, he’s said to have commented, “I’ve been discovered: What does one wear?”

In another context, MacLeish, trying to explain the Murphys’ hard-to-describe charisma, said: “There was a shine to life wherever they were: not a decorative added value but a kind of revelation of inherent loveliness.”

The exhibition, which was originally organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, has been augmented by significant cubist and other works from Yale’s stellar collection of 20th century art, which the Murphys would have known well. It runs through May 4.

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