Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy

by Calvin Tomkins, Deborah Rothschild (Editor)

Paris in the 1920s--art, literature, the Lost Generation. The glitterati who inhabited this legendary world--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, Man Ray, Dorothy Parker, and a host of others--were members of an intimate circle centered around Sara and Gerald Murphy. Making It The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy is a captivating and absorbing collection of essays examining through images and text the Murphys' influence on a remarkable constellation of artists. The book also explores Gerald Murphy's abbreviated career as a painter, his artistic legacy, and the complex nature of his motivation and vision. This beautifully illustrated volume features essays by art historian Deborah Rothschild and such Murphy scholars as Calvin Tomkins, Amanda Vaill, Linda Patterson Miller, Kenneth Silver; curators Dorothy Kosinski and Kenneth Wayne; artist/writer Trevor Winkfield; musicologist Olivia Mattis; and poet and author William Jay Smith.

244 pages, Hardcover

Published August 27, 2007

About the author

Calvin Tomkins has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1960. He wrote his first fiction piece for the magazine in 1958, and his first fact piece in 1962. His many Profile subjects have included Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, Julia Child, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leo Castelli, Frank Stella, Carmel Snow, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney, and Jasper Johns. He wrote the Art World column from 1980 to 1988. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a general editor of Newsweek, a post he held from 1957 through 1959. In 1955, he joined Newsweek as an associate editor. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including “The Bride and the Bachelors,” “Merchants and Masterpieces,” “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” “Off the Wall,” “Duchamp: A Biography,” and “Lives of the Artists.” A revised edition of his Duchamp biography came out in 2014.