Americanism in Paris

Abstract

Sophie Lévy (ed.): A Transatlantic Avant-Garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918–1939 (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), 200 colour plates, 45 b&w illns, 264 pp., paperback ISBN 0 300 09220 6, £22.00. The American expatriate painter Gerald Murphy once told F.Scott Fitzgerald that ‘only the invented parts of our life have any real meaning’.1 Murphy, who travelled to Paris in 1921, was famously the inspiration for Dick Diver, Fitzgerald's protagonist in Tender is the Night, the 1934 novel that was perhaps the most pointed, and poignant, literary summation of the expatriate moment of the 1920s. Like his fictional counterpart, Murphy was credited with ‘discovering’ the French Riviera. The Murphys' house at Cap d'Antibes, the Villa America, was the venue for numerous parties for the fashionable set. Le Corbusier lauded its modernist décor. Murphy's paintings – large, precisely rendered studies of mostly domestic items, typically American goods – were feted for their ‘Americanism’; he was apparently dubbed ‘the only American painter in Paris’ by Fernand Léger.2 Although his return to America in 1932 was due to family tragedy, unlike the fictional Diver's desperate alcoholic decline, Fitzgerald clearly identified Murphy – wealthy, charming, and simpatico – as a paradigm of the American modernist transatlantic love affair, the ‘American in Paris’ of the ‘Lost Generation’ in the ‘Jazz Age’, turning slowly sour.