go here for a larger view: The Watch Gerald Murphy Gerald Murphy was part of the so-called Lost Generation, a group of expatriate artists and writers who flourished between the World Wars in Paris. For Gerald and Sarah Murphy, Paris afforded distance from Gerald’s wealthy family and the opportunity for him to pursue his chosen career as a painter. The Murphys arrived in Paris in 1921, where they quickly became fixtures in a cosmopolitan group that included poet Archibald MacLeish, writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, composer Cole Porter, and painters Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. Paris energized Murphy as America could not. Inspired by the cubists and Russian constructivists, Murphy created paintings in which patterns of line, color, and form dominate the depiction of familiar objects. His background in mechanical and architectural drawing lent itself to this tendency toward abstraction. His subject matter reflected his outlook, as in his own words life in Paris was “fresh, new and invented.” Often Murphy recorded his ideas in a notebook, waiting for his thoughts to crystallize before beginning the painting. His entry for Razor reads: “Picture: razor, fountain pen; etc. in large scale nature morte big match box.” In the painting, Murphy has paired a fountain pen and a safety razor (both recent American inventions), crossed in heraldic fashion, in front of a matchbook cover. Although Murphy declared his lack of interest in modern advertising art, Razor's dependence on graphic design principles is clear. His vision instead may stem from his passion for folk art, notably trade signs that employed pictures of the items for sale. Murphy appreciated their bold designs and strong color. Razor is, in this sense, a thoroughly modern update of an earlier American advertising idiom. Murphy is better remembered as a model for the character of Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. He ceased painting in 1929, his attention increasingly taken up with the illnesses and eventual deaths of both of his sons. In all, he may have produced fewer than twenty paintings, two of which are in the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection. The Razor