In March of 1925, two years after he began making art, Gerald Murphy exhibited Watch at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Watch is both personally symbolic and coolly analytical. In a letter, Murphy wrote that he was "always struck by the mystery and depth of the interiors of a watch—its multiplicity, variety, and feeling of movement, and man's grasp at perpetuity." Beginning with a linear study on graph paper, the artist visually exploded and pieced together two timepieces with specific biographical associations. One was a railroad watch designed for his family’s company, Mark Cross. The other was a gold pocket watch given to him by his wife Sara.

The heroic scale of Murphy’s painting reflects his fascination with modern machinery’s complexity and efficiency. The huge canvas is filled with overlapping, interlocking forms representing gears, dials, wheels, hands, winders, and screws in metallic and vivid colors. Its palette enhances the visual tension, as vibrant shades of orange and yellow share boundaries with a range of cooler blues and grays.

In fragmenting the timepieces and incorporating multiple points of view, Watch testifies to the ever-changing nature of time itself. It also evokes the cubist practice of representing the dynamic act of seeing through a seemingly arbitrary collection of visual data from various perspectives.

Adapted from

• William Keyse Rudolph, DMA Label copy (1963.75.FA), August 2005.
• Eleanor Jones Harvey, "Gerald Murphy, Watch," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Charles Venable (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), 251.
• "Gerald Murphy, Watch," DMA Connect, Dallas Museum of Art, 2012.

• Although Watch is an impressively sizable painting (over 7 feet on each side), it is not Gerald Murphy's largest work. That title belongs to Boatdeck (18 x 12 feet, location unknown), which shocked viewers at the 1924 Salon des Indépendants.

• Gerald Murphy and Archibald MacLeish
  Read about Murphy's friendship with MacLeish on Tom Jungerberg's DMAcanvas blog post (May 17, 2011).
• Literary Connections to the DMA Collection
  Check out Shannon Karol's bibliophile friendly post for DMAcanvas (January 14, 2010).
• Gerald Murphy: 7 Years as a Painter
  Take a look at the biography and images available on Kent Boyer's Doorknob Studio site (2013).
• V.I.B. Visit to the DMA
  A blog post in honor of a visit to the DMA by Murphy's 11-month-old, great godson.
• Vimeo
  Watch an animated video based on Gerald Murphy's Watch.