Marsh, Reginald

The son of artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall, Reginald Marsh was born into a privileged and artistic milieu in Paris in 1898. The family returned to America when he was still young, and Marsh followed a path typical of his social class, eventually majoring in art at Yale University, where he illustrated popular subjects for the Yale Record. Although he began his career as a freelance illustrator for publications as diverse as the Daily News, Vanity Fair (which sent him on the first of many trips to Coney Island), the New Yorker, Fortune, and Life, he is best known for his paintings of New York City.

After the radicalism of the previous decade, Greenwich Village was becoming more commercialized by the time Marsh arrived in the early 1920s, prompting some artists to move to cheaper studios in 14th Street. The eponymous group centered around this area, which included Marsh himself, Isabel Bishop, Raphael Soyer, and Kenneth Hayes, was part of a larger group of figurative American scene painters who inherited the progressive views and realist tendencies of the Ashcan School. Committed to depicting the figure in urban settings, they focused on the lives of average Americans in everyday city situations, combining Old Master traditions with American sources.

In contrast to the largely celebratory paintings of the newly commercialized Union Square, created by Bishop and Kenneth Hayes Miller, Marsh chose to document the restaurants, cheap entertainments, stores, and people in the less salubrious East 14th Street district between Fourth and Third Avenues. Working with precedents established by John Sloan, but constrained by the more genteel norms of the Progressive Era, the younger Marsh exaggerated the gaudiness and sexuality of the heavily made-up and curvaceous women who frequented the burlesques, dance halls, and cheap shops. Bursting with figures and fragments from Marsh's photographs, in scenes that evoke movie stills of the period and a city more and more dominated by advertising, paintings like In Fourteenth Street (1934) and Ten Cents a Dance (1933) capture the energy and tawdry chaos of commerce and entertainment in the district and the exuberance of the lower class. Immigrants' alternative amusement escape, Coney Island, provided Marsh with his other favorite subject, depicted in Coney Island Beach (1945). Works such as Negroes on Rockaway Beach (1934) combine issues of ethnicity with more stereotypically American behavior.

As the Depression worsened, Marsh began to use his earlier experience illustrating magazines of various political persuasions, producing images for New Masses with a more critical edge while the poor and the unemployed who migrated to Union Square from the Bowery are portrayed in Alma Mater (1933). Murals depicting scenes of ships in New York harbor and others for the Treasury Relief Art Project and Cass Gilbert's Custom House, New York, were completed in the mid-1930s. Determined to succeed in every medium and never without a sketchbook, Marsh produced an extraordinary body of work. A number of friends, including Soyer, suggested that his competitiveness contributed to his early death in 1954.