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I had a great weekend. It was filled with friends, fun, celebration, and a lot of driving. I’ll write about the details later, this is a work related email, so if you don’t care what I’m doing at the museum move on now.
My boss is curating an exhibition set to open in 2007 on Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Murphys were a wealthy American couple who moved to France with their three children in the 1920s and had an amazing group of friends that they nutured with parties, trips, letters, and sometimes even money. Gerald painted for seven years and his few surviving canvasses are much admired. Their close friends included Picasso (a couple girlfriends/wives and son), Leger, Natalie Gontcharova, Hemingway (his two wives and children although later he blamed the Murphys for encouraging him to leave his first wife, Hadley, and marry second wife Pauline), Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Archibald and Ada MacLeish, John and Katy Dos Passos, Cole Porter, etc. (I have yet to see the movie Delovely, but I think it’s somewhat required viewing.)
We have some of the Murphy family archives at the museum and I am going through them and cataloguing, photocopying interesting stuff etc. The archives are photos, drawings, letters, postcards, home movies, and objects (such as beautiful gloves, watches, scarves, etc. Gerald’s family owned the upperclass leathergoods store Mark Cross that made expensive gloves, belts, etc. and he was known for always being immaculately dressed.) It’s fascinating material, but a little weird because
1. It’s someone else’s family archives. So other people’s memories, momentos, etc.
2. They lived an incredible life. As a young girl Sara was presented at court and toured Europe going from chateau to chateau. Later they were the first to “discover” the French riviera, extending the tourist season into the summer and making it a hot spot for the rich and famous. They spent time entertaining their friends, decorating their houses, playing with their kids, yachting on their boat, skiing in the Alps, etc.
3. The Murphys’ life turned from fairytale to tragedy. Both of their sons died from illness (one daughter survived), the stock market crash hurt them financially, there were painful moments with friends and family: Sara was estranged from her sister, Scott Fitzgerald died early, Zelda declined, and even Hemingway betrayed them by writing a biting description of Murphy-inspired characters (known as “the rich”) in A Moveable Feast. It’s hard to see the pictures of them in the twenties, swimming in the Mediterranean, lunching on the beach with Picasso, sailing in their yacht the “weather bird” named for a Charlie Parker jazz song, fishing with Hemingway in Florida, etc. without a sense of the tragic, especially when you see the boys.
4. It’s weird to see images of people spending time with their talented friends who became incredible famous. And it’s strange that the Murphys often provided inspiration for their art. Fitzgerald modeled Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night on them and there are several other things dedicated to them. They went to Pamplona with the Hemingways and Ernest urged Gerald to run with the bulls. Later he read them an early draft of The Sun Also Rises. Picasso praised Gerald’s painting, used Sara as a model for a group of drawings and paintings, and brought his mother to spend time at their house on the Medterranean—Villa America. When their son Patrick got sick Leger sent him all these postcards from New York where he doodled on the image, turning the Empire state building into a funny man for example. Cute stuff from a family friend except that friend is Leger. It’s kind of surreal.
Note that I would like to have a similar experience with all of you—looking back in thirty years at pictures of everyone hanging out I can’t wait to say “who knew that Dan would become president, Andrew would cure diseases x,y,z, Erin would solve the mysteries of autism, Chris would start world famous company x, Bay would be such a famous songwriter/muscian, Justin would write the bestseller x, Seth would revolutionize comedy, etc., etc.
Today I’m doing Hemingway stuff. There are many rumors that Sara had affairs with Picasso and Hemingway, but that is doubtful, because she expressed her sense of propriety in her diaries (one author wrote “sex was never in her vocabulary”) and they were surrounded by writers who often worked details from their life into their fiction (or at least their personal correspondence) and no one ever mentioned a thing. It’s clear Scott Fitzgerald was in love with Sara, but she never returned his affections romantically. Anyway, I can sort of see it with Picasso, although a lot of photos show him in a rather unflattering swimming costume and he preferred the black swim trunks and bowler hat look as beach attire.
But my goodness I’m practically swooning over the Hemingway stuff. That kind of aggressive hyper-masculinity is not usually my thing but in these small, blurry black and white photographs he is incredible charismatic. You can almost feel the testosterone sweating through the paper like some potent chemical that hasn’t dissipated despite seventy years in a cardboard box. There are movies of them fishing with Hemingway off the Florida coast that are equally enthralling. The more I read about Hemingway the less I like his personality, but I can certainly see why academics have speculated on an affair. If he existed today the way he did in these images from the late 20s and early 30s I’d have an affair with him.
My boss is curating an exhibition set to open in 2007 on Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Murphys were a wealthy American couple who moved to France with their three children in the 1920s and had an amazing group of friends that they nutured with parties, trips, letters, and sometimes even money. Gerald painted for seven years and his few surviving canvasses are much admired. Their close friends included Picasso (a couple girlfriends/wives and son), Leger, Natalie Gontcharova, Hemingway (his two wives and children although later he blamed the Murphys for encouraging him to leave his first wife, Hadley, and marry second wife Pauline), Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Archibald and Ada MacLeish, John and Katy Dos Passos, Cole Porter, etc. (I have yet to see the movie Delovely, but I think it’s somewhat required viewing.)
We have some of the Murphy family archives at the museum and I am going through them and cataloguing, photocopying interesting stuff etc. The archives are photos, drawings, letters, postcards, home movies, and objects (such as beautiful gloves, watches, scarves, etc. Gerald’s family owned the upperclass leathergoods store Mark Cross that made expensive gloves, belts, etc. and he was known for always being immaculately dressed.) It’s fascinating material, but a little weird because
1. It’s someone else’s family archives. So other people’s memories, momentos, etc.
2. They lived an incredible life. As a young girl Sara was presented at court and toured Europe going from chateau to chateau. Later they were the first to “discover” the French riviera, extending the tourist season into the summer and making it a hot spot for the rich and famous. They spent time entertaining their friends, decorating their houses, playing with their kids, yachting on their boat, skiing in the Alps, etc.
3. The Murphys’ life turned from fairytale to tragedy. Both of their sons died from illness (one daughter survived), the stock market crash hurt them financially, there were painful moments with friends and family: Sara was estranged from her sister, Scott Fitzgerald died early, Zelda declined, and even Hemingway betrayed them by writing a biting description of Murphy-inspired characters (known as “the rich”) in A Moveable Feast. It’s hard to see the pictures of them in the twenties, swimming in the Mediterranean, lunching on the beach with Picasso, sailing in their yacht the “weather bird” named for a Charlie Parker jazz song, fishing with Hemingway in Florida, etc. without a sense of the tragic, especially when you see the boys.
4. It’s weird to see images of people spending time with their talented friends who became incredible famous. And it’s strange that the Murphys often provided inspiration for their art. Fitzgerald modeled Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night on them and there are several other things dedicated to them. They went to Pamplona with the Hemingways and Ernest urged Gerald to run with the bulls. Later he read them an early draft of The Sun Also Rises. Picasso praised Gerald’s painting, used Sara as a model for a group of drawings and paintings, and brought his mother to spend time at their house on the Medterranean—Villa America. When their son Patrick got sick Leger sent him all these postcards from New York where he doodled on the image, turning the Empire state building into a funny man for example. Cute stuff from a family friend except that friend is Leger. It’s kind of surreal.
Note that I would like to have a similar experience with all of you—looking back in thirty years at pictures of everyone hanging out I can’t wait to say “who knew that Dan would become president, Andrew would cure diseases x,y,z, Erin would solve the mysteries of autism, Chris would start world famous company x, Bay would be such a famous songwriter/muscian, Justin would write the bestseller x, Seth would revolutionize comedy, etc., etc.
Today I’m doing Hemingway stuff. There are many rumors that Sara had affairs with Picasso and Hemingway, but that is doubtful, because she expressed her sense of propriety in her diaries (one author wrote “sex was never in her vocabulary”) and they were surrounded by writers who often worked details from their life into their fiction (or at least their personal correspondence) and no one ever mentioned a thing. It’s clear Scott Fitzgerald was in love with Sara, but she never returned his affections romantically. Anyway, I can sort of see it with Picasso, although a lot of photos show him in a rather unflattering swimming costume and he preferred the black swim trunks and bowler hat look as beach attire.
But my goodness I’m practically swooning over the Hemingway stuff. That kind of aggressive hyper-masculinity is not usually my thing but in these small, blurry black and white photographs he is incredible charismatic. You can almost feel the testosterone sweating through the paper like some potent chemical that hasn’t dissipated despite seventy years in a cardboard box. There are movies of them fishing with Hemingway off the Florida coast that are equally enthralling. The more I read about Hemingway the less I like his personality, but I can certainly see why academics have speculated on an affair. If he existed today the way he did in these images from the late 20s and early 30s I’d have an affair with him.
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A beautiful bastard then.
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