Gerald Murphy created only 14 paintings. ‘Watch’ is the most revealing.
Murphy also inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald, was friends with Picasso and helped create the French Riviera we know today.
This massive, mesmerizing work, measuring 6 feet by 6 feet, is one of only 14 pictures painted by Gerald Murphy. Only seven survive. Murphy (1888-1964), with his wife, Sara, was at the center of a dazzling circle that included Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter (Gerald’s roommate at Yale) and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald famously based Dick and Nicole Diver, the central characters in his novel “Tender Is the Night,” on the Murphys.
“Watch,” a treasure at the Dallas Museum of Art, is at once a diagrammatic representation of two small timepieces and a deflected self-portrait. In ways that scholars have only recently come to appreciate, the two things are intimately linked.
The painting’s central timepiece is a railroad watch designed by Mark W. Cross, the leather goods company that Murphy’s businessman father, Patrick, had purchased in the late 1800s, transforming it into a thriving transatlantic luxury brand.
The other, in the picture’s upper right, is a gold pocket watch that Sara, a Cincinnati heiress with a bohemian spirit, had given Gerald as an engagement present. Gerald adored Sara. She represented not only “all that is pure in life,” he wrote her, but also “life itself.” His affection was reciprocated. The problem was that Gerald was attracted to men.
This caused him tremendous and enduring anguish. Later in life, as Deborah Rothschild wrote in “Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” Gerald filled a box with clippings and handwritten notes full of lament and self-loathing (“I should like to break with myself”) and quotes (“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased … ?” from “Macbeth”).
Why paint the inner workings of two timepieces in a magnified, heroic style combining cubist multiplicity with Precisionist exactitude? What was Murphy trying to say about himself?
The allusions to his father and Sara are clear, and the Roman numerals on the face of the pocket watch from her probably allude to the couple’s three children. But time-telling instruments were also resonant metaphors for Murphy’s self-conception.
He once explained that he was “always struck by the mystery and depth of the interiors of a watch — its multiplicity, variety and feeling of movement, and man’s grasp at perpetuity.” Why “perpetuity”?
Watches don’t just tell time; they offer a shot at mastering it. Even as hearts stop pumping, these incredibly delicate instruments are designed to keep on ticking and to be handed down through the generations.
But according to Daniel Nied, the former director of the school of horology at the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors in Columbia, Pa., the mainspring of the central timepiece in “Watch” is separated from the center wheel by a sheath, while the balance wheel is too far from the escape wheel to allow contact. In other words, for all the astonishing accuracy of Murphy’s rendering, the main timepiece in “Watch” appears to be inoperable. This has been read as a coded admission of what Murphy saw as the flaw in his marriage, and within himself.
The Murphys did more than anyone to turn the French Riviera into the playground we know today. But if their parties were legendary, so was their compulsive need to exert control. Their hospitality was famously warm, but it followed a strict timetable. After a 1931 visit, the artist Fernand Léger said: “It is almost as if Time is a member of the family … someone who is consulted and dominates everything.” Another guest, Richard Myers, complained to his wife that “Gerald just managed me within an inch of my life — every minute accounted for.” (All this is in Rothschild’s wonderful catalogue essay.)
In “Tender Is the Night,” Fitzgerald’s character, Dick Diver (based on Gerald) is credited with “the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love.” But there was something compulsive, almost impersonal about his need to produce these “carnivals of affection,” and he was conscious of the “waste and extravagance involved.”
In a letter to the poet Archibald MacLeish, Gerald lamented: “I awaken to find that I have apparently never had one real relationship.” His life, he continued, had been “a process of concealment” of his true nature, and his heart was “a faulty ‘instrument de précision’ ” (high-quality timepiece).
Incredible how a diagrammatic painting of a luxury product can simultaneously anticipate the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and hark back to Oscar Wilde and Henry James. Amazing that it can conjure an idea of the self as paradoxical, contradictory and full of hidden depths. And tragic that, just four years later, its maker lost faith in his own worth as an artist and stopped painting altogether.
