“Well-bred people are no fun to paint. I’d rather paint an old suit of clothes than a new one”……

New York of the 1930s was in the process of becoming everything it wanted to be—a raucous, tawdry, elegant, sophisticated, zealous, over-crowded, over whelming, yet tastefully understated composite of a world class city. After the next War—the one just over the horizon; the one everyone refused to believe would ever be visited upon us—New York would finally assume its place at the cultural epicenter of the world, sadly elevated by the mountains of rubble that the leading cities of Europe had once been. Add to this mix, Reginald Marsh, an urban realist painter known for his powerful, satirical images of the unseemly side of New York life during the 1930s and ‘40s. While his illustrations demonstrate an exaggeration of human form and sexuality, they become a visually compelling and honest historical testament to the many facets of the New York scene and, more broadly, to the human spirit of his time.

Above, left:Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), In Fourteenth Street (1934), egg tempera on composition board. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. artes fine arts magazine

Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York, on view at the New-York Historical Society through September 1, 2013, showcases a selection of paintings, photographs and prints of a city brought to life by a first-hand witness to the spectacles and teeming streets of Depression-era New York. Guest curated by Whitney Museum of American Art curator, Barbara Haskell and art historian, Sasha Nicholas, this first Marsh retrospective in two decades comprises 60 paintings, drawings and prints by Marsh, plus another 30 artworks by contemporaries, helping to put his oeuvre in context.

“No other artist matched Marsh’s ability to communicate the overwhelming but exhilarating chaos of the city and the impressive vibrancy of its inhabitants,” Haskell notes. “By means of choppy, calligraphic brushwork and densely packed compositions that exude a lusty physicality, Marsh presented the agitated motion and tumultuous disarray of the city as an antidote to the isolation and psychic fragmentation of modern life.”

Born in Paris, Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) was the progeny of two talented artist-parents. At the age of two, Marsh immigrated with his family to the U.S., settling in Nutley, New Jersey. Marsh’s wealthy grandfather afforded him every educational opportunity, and he eventually went to Yale, where he worked on the school newspaper, The Yale Record. It was there he met lifelong friend William Benton. After graduating from Yale in 1920, Marsh moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League; he gained experience painting and drawing under an impressive faculty that included John Sloan, George Bridgeman, George Luks, and most importantly, Kenneth Hays Miller.

Immersing himself within the teeming life of New York City, Marsh job as a staff artist for the New York Daily News led him to explore the underbelly of society: Trolling the streets of Lower Manhattan, he gleaned inspiration from the burlesque shows along Bowery Street, storefront windows and advertisements, and the beaches of Coney Island. The defining quality of Marsh’s work was his satirical approach to portraying what would otherwise be Gotham’s most sinister subjects, and Miller encouraged the artist to focus on the buxom women of Bowery, telling Marsh, “Sex is your theme.”

Above, left: Minsky’s Chorus (1935), tempera on composition board. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Hackett in honor of Edith and Lloyd Goodrich 83.54.

Given that the nearly one third of the artist’s oeuvre captured the spirit of modernity in the form of burlesque dancers, it is apparent that Miller’s assertion rang true. In 1922, Marsh enrolled briefly in the Art Students League, where he met the Betty Burroughs, whose father was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The couple married one year later, marking the point in Marsh’s career when he began painting seriously. His efforts were awarded in 1924, when the Whitney Studio Club offered the artist his first one-man show.

In 1925, Marsh traveled to Europe with his wife for the first time since his infancy. The artist’s encounter with the French Baroque style resulted in a definitive shift in his artistic approach. His began to crowd his compositions with figures, infusing them with a sense of chaos, mayhem, and overindulgence, adding an intense vitality to each piece. Marsh’s paintings incorporated intense, sketch-like brushstrokes, while his etchings began to demonstrate a frenzied attention to detail to physical and architectural attributes. On his return, Marsh resumed an acquaintance with his past instructor Kenneth Hays Miller, whose influence helped the artist synthesize the form and design qualities typical of the Baroque era with the immediate and raw life of New York City. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, Union Square appealed to many members of Manhattan’s burgeoning bourgeois class, and in 1926 Marsh joined the myriad of artists working in one of the 14th Street studios. When the market crashed in 1929, Marsh was captivated by the devastating poverty that spread through New York City. He affirmed his artistic interest on the wreckage and survivors of ‘Black Tuesday’ by explaining, “This world [of poverty] had greater human and pictorial value than respectable society.”

Left: Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), BMT Fourteenth Street (1932), egg tempera on panel. Private collection.

In the early 1930s, the government began funding public artwork in federal buildings, and Marsh was one of twelve artists selected for two important commissions: the first, a pair of frescoes in the new York City Post Office, and the second, a series of eight paintings in the New York Customs House, which portrayed an ocean liner arriving into a New York port. These works were stylistic outliers for Marsh, and the artist soon reverted back to his traditional elements, the “garish colors, excessive detail, limited space, awkward poses, and ludicrous costuming” that were so typical in his burlesque and Coney Island scenes.

These defining aspects of Marsh’s style attracted artist, William Benton, a former peer from Yale. A close friend of Marsh, Benton began collecting the artist’s work in 1934, and sometimes acted as his informal dealer. Their relationship thrived on the shared sensibilities found in Marsh’s work. Benton once said, “I like Marsh’s paintings for the same reason that I like Marsh. I like their lustiness, vitality, their marvelous craftsmanship, their love of life, their verve and zest.” Benton was not the only one to take notice of the dark humor in the sexually-charged paintings by Marsh; critics described his work as “sumptuous and sexy…swirling…things of strange allure…tumultuous,” and “grossly satirical pictures of unbuttoned sexuality.”

Above, right: Harlem, Tuesday Night at the Savoy (1932) tempera on board. Private collection.

Curator, Barbara Haskell points out that “Marsh was mesmerized by excess and physical abandon in direct proportion to his own fear of losing control. He was manic about work, never taking a vacation and spending every day painting, photographing, or sketching, and every evening etching, printing photographs, or attending burlesques and nightclubs.” Detailed notebooks, found after his death, reflected an obsessive need to account for every minute of his time, locations visited, expenses and efforts related to making art. Haskell surmises that, “only by vigilantly imposing order did Marsh feel he could keep chaos at bay. Paradoxically, his obsessive need to maintain control in his own personal life may have accounted for his voyeuristic attraction to the disorder and sensuality of others.”

“The stereotype most commonly associated with Marsh’s work, according to Haskell, “is the Siren, the voluptuous queen of thirties film, whose vernacular counterpart played a central role in his paintings. His burlesque strippers, taxi-dancers, and sexually-provocative shoppers on 14th Street were seen in his lifetime, as they are today, as exuding “unbridled sexuality.” A number of critics and art historians have addressed the preponderance of this theme in Marsh’s work, as Haskell explains, offering explanations that reflect the signs of changing times.

Left: Star Burlesque (1933) egg tempera on masonite. Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

At first observers described Marsh’s “appreciation for the charms of exposed flesh,” and his unattainable obsession with the female form, as the equivalent of Captain Ahab’s futile pursuit of Melville’s great white whale. Others saw the women portrayed in his paintings as symbols of female sexual power, attributing the prevalence of Bowery bums, muscle men and sirens as evidence of anxiety about his own masculinity, sense of personal power and fears of failure. More recently, still others, according to Haskell describe Marsh as “caricaturing female and African-American bodies as unrefined, lower-class ‘others’ in order to diffuse their threatening sexual and political power.” She concedes that Marsh’s images are both ambiguous and complex, “leaving unanswered the question of his motivations and attitudes toward his subjects.”

Reginald Marsh rejected modernistic trends in art, finding them sterile. He often engaged in contentious debates with contemporaries over the obligation of artists to reflect, through their art, the times they were living in. Marsh remained committed through his life to social realism, as he depicted the Great Depression and a range of social classes whose division was accentuated by the economic crash. His figures are generally treated as types. What interested Marsh was not the individual in a crowd, but the crowd itself. Embracing the cinema and the dominance of the Hollywood culture that was a sign of the times for Depression-era Americans, Marsh’s painting captured the density and picturesque quality of the crowds, as in the contemporaneous movies of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra”.

Above, right: Pip and Flip, (1932), tempera on paper mounted on canvas. Terra Foundation for American Art, The Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.96.

Marsh’s main attractions were the burlesque stage, the hobos on the Bowery, crowds on city streets His deep devotion to the old masters led to his creating works of art in a style that reflects certain artistic traditions, going so far as to adopt the challenging Renaissance technique of egg tempera medium on board in 1929, for many of his paintings. This added a lush, textural quality to the image, well-suited to the atmospherics of the bars, bordellos and crowded streets he portrayed.

His work often contained religious metaphors. It was on his quotation of the Baroque masters that Marsh based his own human comedy, inspired by the past but residing in the present. The burlesque queen in the etching Striptease at New Gotham (1935) assumes the classic Venus Pudica pose; elsewhere, ‘Venuses and Adonises’ walk the beaches of Coney Island and disheveled figures lay collapsed in the Bowery, like so many deposed Christ’s. The painting Fourteenth Street (1934), depicts a large crowd in front of a theater hall, in a tumbling arrangement that recalls a Last Judgment.

Left: Lifeguards (1933), tempera on hardboard panel. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Purchase GMOA 1948.205; Below: Two gelatin prints by the artist, Coney Island, “Lifeguards at Coney Island beach” and “People on Coney Island beach” (1933). Museum of the City of New York.

Marsh filled sketchbooks with drawings made on the street, in the subway, or at the beach. Marilyn Cohen calls Marsh’s sketchbooks “the foundation of his art. They show a passion for contemporary detail and a desire to retain the whole of his experience”. He drew not only figures but costumes, architecture, and locations. He made drawings of posters and advertising signs, the texts of which were copied out along with descriptions of the colors and use of italics. In the early 1930s he took up photography as another means of note taking.

Signage, newspaper headlines, and advertising images are often prominent in Marsh’s finished paintings, in which color is used to expressive ends—drab and brown in Bowery scenes; lurid and garish in sideshow scenes.

According to curator, Barbara Haskell, while some criticized Marsh for making more overtly political statements through his work, “most applauded his for ‘telling hard truths’ about the reality of contemporary life. His work attracted the attention of museums in the `30s, but the “brutal honesty and uncompromising reality that critics lauded were a deterrent to many private collectors. Other than his classmate from Yale and fellow artist, William Benton, who in 1935, began to buy one painting a month from Marsh, he made few private sales during his lifetime—a dearth he attributed to his subject matter. ‘Maybe my pictures have too much shock value in them for a lot of people—especially for women—to hang on the walls at home…Not too many people want to be reminded in their living rooms or bedrooms of the people they see—or don’t see—walking on the streets of New York. Makes them feel uncomfortable.”

Far right: Tatoo and Haircut (1932), egg tempera on masonite. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Earl Ludgin, The Art Institute of Chicago; right: Reginald Marsh, Untitled (Bowery Street), ca. 1930s). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Marsh continued to paint through the later years of his life, but also began to take on a more educational role. Marsh’s life was unexpectedly cut short in 1954 on July 3rd, when he suffered a fatal heart attack and passed away in Dorset, Vermont at the age of 56.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

The New-York Historical Society is at 170 Central Park West. For information, 212-873-3400 or www.nyhistory.org

 Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Thirties New York (Hardcover)

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Edited by Barbara Haskell. Essays by Morris Dickstein, Erika Doss, Barbara Haskell, Jackson Lears, Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, and Sasha Nicholas

Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York is the first major assessment of the work of American Scene artist Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) in 30 years. Focusing on 60 paintings, drawings, and prints, drawn from public and private collections across the U.S., along with a selection of his photographs and sketches, it puts Marsh’s exuberant depictions of urban daily life within the context of the economic uncertainty of 1930’s America and the work of fellow artists who shared his interest in the New York scene.

This striking volume sets Marsh’s fascinating work of the 1930’s alongside paintings, prints, and photographs of contemporaries such as Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Walt Kuhn, Raphael and Isaac Soyer, Guy Pene du Bois, Bernice Abbott, Aaron Siskind, Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein. Together, they tell a complex and highly contrasting visual story of New York City life in this tumultuous time of change just before the world returned to war.