Biography
Attractive, stylish, wealthy, and considered charming company by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway, Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara figured prominently in the Lost Generation of Americans in Paris during the Jazz Age. Murphy produced relatively few paintings, but his deconstructed renderings of everyday objects in flat, unmodulated colors are celebrated for their meticulous fusion of Cubist and Constructivist ideas. Shaped by his earlier aspirations to be an architect and influenced by Juan Gris, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger, Murphy creating poster-like, graphic canvases with painstaking architectural precision. Watch (1925), perhaps his best-known work, depicts a timepiece splayed out in such a way as to evoke the inner workings of a factory.
