American Art Collaborative

The largest of Gerald Murphy’s works,Watch is both personally symbolic and coolly analytical.The mechanical components of this painting come from two timepieces with specific biographical associations for Murphy: a railroad watch designed by his family’s company, Mark Cross, and a gold pocket watch in his own possession.The combination of these two sources and their fragmentation across the vast surface of the canvas, from multiple points of view, testifies to the ever-changing nature of time itself. It also evokes the cubist practice of representing the of visual data from various perspectives.