Gerald & Sarah Murphy at WCMA

If I could vaporize and immediately reappear in a far-away place, I'd spend today in Williamstown, Mass. at the Williams College Museum of Art. I read in the New Yorker about a small exhibition there that sounds really fantastic: The Art and Style of Gerald and Sarah Murphy.

The Murphys were an incredibly stylish couple living in the most stylish cities during one of history's most stylish periods: the 1920s. They ooze a certain panache that is so intriguing. I've always been kind of obsessed with the art and style of the 1920s, particularly in New York and Paris, so what I'd do to be Sarah's gal-pal for a day! I really need to figure out that vaporizer time-travel thingy.

Gerald was a terrific artist who truly captured the flavor of the era, but he didn't take painting very seriously as a career, and only 7 of his paintings survive to this day (including these two: Wasp and Pear from 1929 and Razor from 1924. All of the remaining works appear in the show, alongside works by contemporaries and friends Picasso, Léger, Gris and several photos of the Murphys and other ephemera from their friendships with luminaries with big names like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker and Braque.

Click here to read Peter Schjeldahl's review of the exhibition in the New Yorker, and here to view the New Yorker's great slide show of Gerald's remaining paintings, and snapshots of the Murphy's fabulous world.

The show runs through Nov. 11 at WCMA then travels to Yale University Art Gallery from Feb. 26 to May 4, 2008, then to Dallas Museum of Art (my alma mater) from June 8 to Sept. 14. Looks like I'll be dragging my Dallas family there next summer!