Living Well Is the Best Revenge - Softcover

Tomkins, Calvin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0525480234 ISBN 13: 9780525480235

Publisher: Plume, 1982

Synopsis

First published in 1971 and now available for a younger generation with a new introduction by the author, Living Well Is the Best Revenge is Calvin Tomkins' now-classic account of the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American expatriates who formed an extraordinary circle of friends in France during the 1920s. First in Paris and then in the seaside town of Antibes, they played host to a cast of some of the most memorable artists and writers of the era, including Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Ernest Hemingway and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It was in Paris that Gerald Murphy first encountered Cubist painting, which prompted him to embark on an all-too-brief career as a painter--roughly from 1922 to 1929--during which he produced 15 works, seven of which survive, and every one of which is a unique American modernist masterpiece. This dazzling phase of work was brought to a close in 1929, when one of the Murphys' sons, Patrick, was diagnosed with tuberculosis and the family returned to New York. When their second son, Boath, succumbed to meningitis in 1935, and Patrick's death followed shortly thereafter in 1937, Murphy hung up his brush. Despite the brevity of Murphy's oeuvre, the intensity of its conception and its recently acknowledged status as a crucial precedent to Pop art have elevated Murphy's reputation considerably. In 1974, The Museum of Modern Art mounted the first Gerald Murphy retrospective. Illustrated with nearly 70 photographs from the Murphys' family album and with a special section on Murphy's paintings, Living Well presents a fascinating Lost Generation chronicle as charming and enticing as the couple themselves.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

In this enchanting memoir, New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins re-creates the privileged world of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American originals who found themselves at the center of a charmed circle of artists and expatriate writers in France in the 1920s. Their home in Antibes, Villa America, served as a gathering place for Picasso and Léger as well as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who used the glamorous couple as models for Dick and Nicole Diver in
Tender Is the Night. A bestseller when it first appeared in 1971, Living Well Is the Best Revenge features sixty-nine intimate photographs collected from the Murphys' family album, along with reproductions
of several of Gerald Murphy's remarkable paintings--canvases that predate Pop Art by forty years.
        "Living Well Is the Best Revenge is
a superb little study, alive with an elegance very much the Murphys'," said Nancy Mitford. Critic Russell Lynes found the book to be "at once a sharp and charming evocation of an era and a cast, mostly delightful, surely famous, and usually talented, written with an elegant balance between tongue in cheek and sympathy."
        This Modern Library edition includes Calvin Tomkins's new Introduction and a rewritten last chapter.

From the Back Cover:

"        The dichotomy between art and life
permeates Tomkins's book and makes
up its principal charm. . . . [The Murphys]
drew artists and writers to them
ineluctably. After all, they were works
of art while the others--Stein,Picasso, Hemingway, MacLeish, Fitzgerald--
were only trying to create such
works. . . . [This is a] beautiful and
evocative memoir. . . . The charming
and imperturbable Gerald Murphy
[was] a master of the art of living."
--Louis Auchincloss

"        A marvel of taste and economy, Living
Well Is the Best Revenge manages to
convey the originality and grace of
the Murphys' life."

--Time

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0525480234
• ISBN 13: 9780525480235
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1