Art Book Review: Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York

There have been many attempts to neatly tie Reginald Marsh to various movements of American painting from the Fourteenth Street School to the Regionalist and yet that with which he was really most closely aligned, in spirit if not always in style, was the Ashcan School whose influence had peaked a decade or more before Marsh created his most significant work.  Like John Sloan and George Bellows before him, Marsh was mesmerized by the teeming life that filled the streets of New York City.  Though himself of upper class origins (born in Paris to an upper middle class family and educated at Yale), Marsh was always attracted to the lower classes - subway riders, burlesque strippers, Bowery bums, and Coney Island musclemen.  These were his subjects of choice in a city suffering through the worst years of the Depression.

Several years ago, I saw an excellent retrospective at the New York Historical Society entitled Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York that had been curated by Barbara Haskell of the Whitney Museum.  It was one of the few major exhibits that had been devoted to the artist following his death in 1954.  On view were many of his best known works as well as those of other artists who were active during the Depression.  The exhibit was accompanied by a catalog which I recently purchased at the Strand Bookstore on 12th Street, very near the Union Square location where Marsh once had his studio.

In developing his distinctive style, Marsh did not slavishly follow the Ashcan artists or other American realist painters such as Thomas Eakins but instead looked to old masters whose works he had seen and copied on his travels through Europe.  His great breakthrough came when he was introduced, by his friend Thomas Hart Benton, to the egg tempera process.  Used extensively by medieval and early Renaissance artists for panel painting, tempera had the great advantage of drying quickly, thus allowing Marsh to continuously apply brushstrokes to a given work without the necessity of first allowing the layers beneath to stand and dry.  As for content, Marsh's work was distinguished by crowding figures into the foreground against cityscape backgrounds.  With this technique, Marsh was able to convey the frenzied rush that filled the streets and sidewalks of New York.

The catalog contains several short but highly relevant essays.  The first of these, by Barbara Haskell herself, provides an overview of the artist's work and places him securely in the period of his greatest productivity.  It also furnishes the biographical details needed to understand his highly complex personality.  Even though Marsh's upper class background gave him entry to high society - his first wife was the daughter of Bryson Burroughs, at the time curator of painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - he was never at home in such a milieu and resolutely refused to paint those who were.  Taking the position that "well-bred people are no fun to paint," Marsh was repelled by the artificial manners of the rich if for no other reason than that "People of wealth spend money to disguise themselves."  One has to assume that this was, at least to an extent, a reaction against his father's career as a society painter.

The most interesting essay in the catalog is "Keeping the Carnival in Town" by Jackson Lears who details the manner in which the "anything goes" license traditionally granted revelers during Europe's carnival season became a permanent fixture in New York City during the Depression years.  Another essay by Sasha Nicholas investigates Marsh's use of photography to capture detail for his paintings while still another by Lance Mayer and Gay Myers provides and in-depth analysis of the materials and processes used by Marsh to create his works.

One unfortunate omission from both the exhibit and catalog are almost any examples of Marsh's graphic work. Marsh was extremely accomplished at etching and explored in his graphic work the same themes, and very often the same subjects, as in his paintings. It could be argued that certain scenes seeking to convey a sense of stark realism actually work better in graphic form, for example the 1932 Bread Line - No One Has Starved, the only graphic work that is reproduced in the catalog. To see more of Marsh's etchings, as well as engravings and linocuts, the interested reader should turn to the 1976 study The Prints of Reginald Marsh by Norman Sasowsky.