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Gerald Murphy-An American Artist in Paris: 1921–1933
Gerald Murphy — the son of a New York store owner — with his wife, Sarah, created a haven for writers and artists in Paris and Cap d’Antibes …
Gerald Murphy was probably the first jet-setter before there were jets, and a young man who did not want to be imprisoned in his father’s very successful fancy goods store in New York for the rest of his life, even though it gave him a very good living. No, he wanted something else, but wasn’t sure what.
“ So what do you want to do Gerald?” asked his father, as Gerald looked wistfully out onto the busy street.
Gerald thought about it.
“ A landscape architect.”
He couldn’t think of anything else. So off he went to the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture. Better that, thought his father, than standing around in the store with his hands in his pockets.
Gerald and Sarah Wiborg (Sarah’s great uncle was General William Tecumseh Sherman) had been married some three years by the time they moved to Cambridge, and the life they began to live there was good, making friends with the literary set, with Gerald learning the practical skill of precise architectural draughtsmanship, at the same time studying botany and reading all the books he’d meant to read but had never got round to.
But dark clouds had loomed with the passing of the 18th Amendment. Gerald reckoned that any government which succeeded in turning a nation dry could get away with anything. Maybe it was time to get out and find refuge elsewhere.
Consequently, in the spring of 1921, Gerald and Sarah, with their three children, sailed for England, spending the summer months there travelling the countryside studying gardens and landscape architecture. In the autumn they took a ferry across the English Channel to France, finally settling in Paris in an apartment in the rue Greuze.
Calvin Tomkins writes:
“ Walking down the Rue de la Boëtie one autumn morning in 1921, soon after their arrival in Paris, Gerald Murphy stopped to look in the window of the Rosenberg gallery, went inside, and saw, for the first time in his life, paintings by Braque, Picasso, and Juan Gris. What he felt at that moment was the shock of…
