As wealthy American expatriates in Paris during the 1920s, Sara and Gerald Murphy attended all the glamorous parties and dined at the best restaurants. They championed the American cocktail, jazz music, and avant-garde art, and their circle of friends reads like a who’s who of 20th-century creative juggernauts, counting Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, and Cole Porter. They took private art lessons from Natalia Goncharova and painted sets for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Their summer pilgrimages to a house on the beach at Antibes, aptly named Villa America, spearheaded the fad for vacationing on the French Riviera. What the Murphys were after was nothing less than the transformation of the act of living into a refined art form, a goal that inspired Fitzgerald to model the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver in “Tender Is the Night” after them. In the process, their lives became the very template of the elegant simplicity that would come to define the new modernist American aesthetic.

In order for the exhibit “Making It New” to express the headiness of this nexus of extreme creativity, senior curator of the Williams College Museum of Art, Deborah Rothschild, seamlessly balances three main themes, each one capable of being a complete exhibition in itself. First are the numerous photographs, letters, film clips, costumes, and other ephemera that provide an onthe-spot documentary not only depicting the Murphys’ life as fable, but also the truly romantic, soulmate nature of their relationship, despite Gerald’s well-known homosexuality. Second are the prime examples of the new art forms taking root in Paris’s post-WWI creative hotbed — such as Cubism, Constructivism, and Dada — and include drawings and paintings by Picasso, Braque, Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier, Juan Gris, and Léger, among others, as well as photographs by Man Ray.

The third theme is the most significant, for it comprises the seven extant paintings of the mere 12 Gerald made while living in Paris. He did not paint before he and Sara arrived in France, and refused to paint after their return to America, mainly due to grief over the death of his two sons. At the time of their making, Gerald’s paintings were highly acclaimed for their bold style influenced by poster advertisements and theater sets and for their keen — and very American — eye for elevating and deifying products of industrialization, such as a pack of matches and a safety razor in “Razor” (1924). In retrospect, his paintings can even be seen as laying the groundwork for American Pop art. Unfortunately, though major museums like the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art own his work, the general gallery-going public has always been mostly unaware of this true American original.

In his large painting titled “Watch” (1925), Gerald magnifies the inner workings of a common pocket watch to an almost terrifying scale. Employing a reduced palette of grays and yellows, he spreads cogwheels, curvaceous Sforms, and stylized gears flatly across the picture plane, resulting in a precisely orchestrated ballet of whirrs and hums celebrating the machine age. While European influences are evident — Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s Orphism comes to mind — Gerald not only distinguishes his work through the use of industrial subject matter. By situating a confrontationally frontal motif around a central cartouche, he deftly exploits elements of graphic design to keep the painting free of the artist’s hand yet still imbue the whole with emotion.

“Wasp With Pear” (1929), presumably Gerald’s last painting, contains the improbable juxtaposition of folksy directness — similar in spirit to fellow American Grant Wood — with a razor-sharp pictorial intelligence. Here, Gerald has painted a wasp that is menacingly leaching sugary life from a halved pear, setting up a surreal narrative within a quasi-Cubist composition. In a slight departure from his earlier work, Gerald trades his love of enlarged machine parts for a more straightforward still life. But his natural inclination for a meticulous observation of life’s overlooked or mundane items is given form when he incorporates a visual technique borrowed from diagrams found in scientific journals and paints a magnifying lens over the wasp’s hind leg. Also, the pear’s bulbous green bottom — a pun Gerald surely intended — is painted a flat acid green, lending the quality of continually applyied pressure to the picture plane, and in turn making the pear seem larger than it really is.

For Sara and Gerald Murphy, modernism was the idea of a lifestyle in the real world and not something to sequester in an art studio. They lived well, and their constellation of talented friends attests to their popularity and success as both muses and enablers. Fortunately, Gerald also took his ideas of modernism to the studio and created a small body of work that helped refocus the international art world’s attention on an emergent — and soon-to-be dominant — American scene. Viewing his works here in context with those of his more famous contemporaries thoroughly debunks the idea that Gerald’s paintings are simply the decorative neo-Cubist daubs of a wealthy dilettante. If only the rest of his paintings could be found.

Until November 11 (15 Lawrence Hall Drive, suite 2; Williamstown, Mass., 413-597-2429)