“If that’s painting, that’s what I want to do,” Murphy remarked in 1922, upon discovering paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris in a Paris gallery. Soon after, he ended his career as a landscape architect and turned to painting. In Wasp and Pear, he combined anatomically detailed and highly stylized depictions of his subjects—a wasp, pear, leaf, and honeycomb—with an abstract background of overlapping planes of color. As his inspiration, Murphy credited the “technically drawn and colored charts of fruits, vegetables . . . [and] insects” found in a classroom in which he studied during his military training.
Gallery label from 2019
In 1922, upon discovering the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris in the window of a Paris gallery, Murphy told his wife, "If this is painting, then this is what I want to do." Soon after, he ended his career as a landscape architect and turned to painting. In Wasp and Pear, Murphy combined an abstract background with an anatomically detailed but highly stylized wasp, pear, leaf, and honeycomb. Murphy credited "the large technically drawn and colored charts of fruits, vegetables . . . [and] insects" in a classroom where he had studied during his military training as his inspiration.
Gallery label from 2012.
