Gerald Murphy
1888–1964
The son of a self-made American millionaire, Gerald Murphy moved to Paris in the fall of 1921 and settled into a glamorous social life with other expatriate Americans: the composer Cole Porter and writers Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Enthralled by the new art he encountered in the city, he decided to become an artist, studying painting for a few months with Natalia Goncharova, an émigré Russian artist. By 1924 his paintings were being included in important vanguard exhibitions in Paris. What distinguished his art from French Purism, with which it shared smooth surfaces and fastidiously demarcated forms set against abstract shapes, was his magnification of commonplace products in the style of modern magazine advertisements and billboards.
Nowhere is this style more evident than in Cocktail, a collage-like presentation of bar accessories together with a trompe- l’oeil cigar box and tax label, all rendered in flat, minute detail and arranged frontally or in profile. Cocktails were considered an American invention, and Murphy was famous for serving them to his guests. The components of the painting are thus representative of Murphy’s life in France, which he described as “all somehow an American experience.” Murphy stopped painting in 1928 after one of his sons was diagnosed with tuberculosis and by 1934 was back in America running Mark Cross, the family’s leather-goods business. During his short career he produced fewer than fifteen paintings, only seven of which survive. Not shown in the United States until 1960, they immediately established Murphy as a central figure of “Jazz Age” modernism.
Roles
Artist, businessman, painter
ULAN identifier
500011818
Names
Gerald Murphy
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 27, 2025.
