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Loading... Living Well Is the Best Revenge (1971)by Calvin Tomkins
In and About the 1920s (116) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Garald and Sara Murphy pop up in any book about the writers, artists, and American expats living in France in the 1920s, and since I read a lot of those kinds of books, it was good to learn a little more about this couple. This lovely MoMA edition is enhanced by photos (although they are a bit small and hard to really see) and images of Gerald's paintings. ( ) What is it about Sara and Gerald Murphy? Was it their personalities that made them so attractive? Or was it just the era they were living in at the time? This was back in the day when people gave houses as wedding gifts and didn’t worry about the red tape and mountains of paperwork that went with it. Maybe it was the people they associated with that made their light glow a little brighter. For Sara and Gerald Murphy could call Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, John Dos Passos, and, of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald as their friends. Maybe it was their talents. Gerald, encouraged and inspired by Picasso among others, spent nine years as an artist, creating breathtaking paintings. Sadly, he only produced ten works of art and many are either missing or have been destroyed. Together, Sara and Gerald knew how to throw an intimate, yet memorable party. They had personality and flair. Although this is a tiny book, Tomkins gives a succinct portrait of the captivating couple. This is a short biography of the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, wealthy Americans who chose to spend the 1920s and early 1930s living in France. They became friends with Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger among others. “Archibald MacLeish, another old and very close friend, remarked that from the beginning of the Murphys’ life in Europe, ‘person after person--English, French, American, everybody--met them and came away saying that these people really are masters in the art of living.’” Although in many ways the Murphys lived a charmed life in the 1920s, things changed in the 30s. The love of painting that Gerald had discovered (and was very good at) was abandoned when he had to return to New York to take over the family business (Mark Cross, a leather goods store), and both of their sons succumbed to illnesses before they reached adulthood. The book contains almost 50 pages of photographs and the one I’ll remember is of the outlines of their new yacht that Gerald drew to scale in white lime on the lawn outside their son’s hospital window. It summed up for me the combination of fortune and misfortune in their lives. This book seemed like a New Yorker magazine profile and it turned out that’s exactly how it started out. Calvin Tompkins was a staff writer at The New Yorker and their art critic for years as well as a friend of the Murphys. One of the best parts of the book is his discussion of Gerald’s paintings which were done in a “style that lay midway between realism and abstraction.” Gerald “once told a friend that he was never entirely happy until he began painting, and that he was never really happy again after he stopped.” This is a well told, bittersweet story of some interesting people that is going into my “Good Quick Reads” collection. Recommended. no reviews | add a review
A portrait of American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, focusing on their lives in Paris in the 1920s. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)944.0041300922History & geography History of Europe France and Monaco FranceLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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