The exhibition will be on view from June 1 to September 14, 2008.

Featuring eight paintings by Gerald Murphy himself, which Newsweek describes as “striking,” the collection of keepsakes, letters and memorabilia harkens back to a time of innovation, style and beauty. The New York Times called Gerald Murphy the “progenitor of Pop Art,” and The New Yorker said his paintings are “a gold standard that backs, with creative integrity, the paper money of the couple’s legend.”

The Dallas presentation of Making It New—the final venue on a three-city national tour that included the Williams College Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery—will also celebrate the near 50th anniversary of the first and only exhibition of Gerald Murphy’s paintings during his lifetime. It was held at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts (which merged with the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts to form the Dallas Museum of Art).

Making It New explores how the Murphys’ legendary style—modern in its apparent simplicity and freedom from stifling social regimentation—was an inspiration to the artists and writers of the Lost Generation. The exhibition sees the Murphys’ friends F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Sergei Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau as among those who encoded the ethos of the Murphys’ lives into progressive 20th-century art, literature, music and taste.

Unlike previous exhibitions, Making It New places Gerald’s boldly colored and meticulously rendered oil paintings alongside works by major artists of the day and a broad spectrum of never-before-exhibited objects and archival materials reflecting the period.

Gerald Murphy’s jazz-rhythmed painting entitled Razor (1924) and the 6-by-6-foot Watch (1925) will be shown in the exhibition. Both are part of the Museum’s permanent collection and are two of eight remaining paintings in Murphy’s 14-work oeuvre.

Major paintings by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Juan Gris and Georges Braque, including a number of works inspired by the Murphys, are also featured, as is a series of watercolors dedicated to Gerald and Sara by Leger; drawings by Jean Cocteau, Francis Picabia and others; and photographs of the Murphy family and its circle by Man Ray.

Snapshots of Sara Murphy and friends, posing like the three graces, will be exhibited alongside Picasso’s sinuous line drawing of the scene. And several Picasso portraits of women, debated as secret images of Sara Murphy, will be juxtaposed with photographs that suggest she might have been one of several sources that fed into his conception of ideal womanhood at the time.

Making It New was conceived and organized by Deborah Rothschild, recently retired Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art. The presenting curator in Dallas is William Keyse Rudolph, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art at the Museum.

This exhibition has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: great ideas brought to life; the Terra Foundation for American Art; the Getty Foundation; and the Dedalus Foundation, Inc. Air transportation provided by American Airlines.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. -- www.dallasmuseumofart.org