Dated Web objects 1920-1959

Reginald Marsh

Date: 1930

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund

Object number: 1998.4

Text Entries: Sotheby's New York, New York (September 24, 1998): lot 237.<br><br>Brownlee, Peter John.  <i>Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape</i>. (exh. cat., Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for American Art and Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008.  Text p. 37 (checklist).<br><br> Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Peter John Brownlee, eds. <i>Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook.</i> Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2018. Text p. 212; ill. p. 212 (color).<br><br> Piccoli, Valéria, Fernanda Pitta, and Taylor Poulin. <i>Pelas ruas: vida moderna e experiências urbanas na arte dos Estados Unidos, 1893-1976</i>. (exh. cat., Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Terra Foundation for American Art). São Paulo, Brazil: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2022. Pl. p. 70 (color).<br><br>

Reginald Marsh

Date: 1931

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1995.44

Text Entries: Sasowsky, Norman. <i>Reginald Marsh: Etchings, Engravings, Lithographs</i>. New York: Praeger, 1956.<br><br> Sasowksy, Norman. <i>The Prints of Reginald Marsh</i>. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1976. No. 115, pp. 161–62.

Reginald Marsh

Date: 1932

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection.

Object number: 1995.18

Text Entries: A group of men stand idle in this crowded, nocturnal scene of New York City printed during the Depression. When Reginald Marsh moved to New York in 1920, he began work as a free-lance illustrator and cartoonist, finding his subjects while walking around the city. He came to know New York intimately, constantly sketching its streets and people. It is not surprising, therefore, that he left behind more than 200 sketchbooks when he died. His favorite themes included crowds and scenes of public entertainment such as dance halls, beaches, and roller coasters. In the 1930s he produced numerous scenes of New Yorkers struggling through the Depression: breadlines, soup kitchens, and unemployed, inactive men. In this print, we see a group of men standing alone or in small groups in the part of Manhattan known as the Bowery. They seem listless and unresponsive as if waiting for something to happen. They are probably unemployed and possibly homeless. The crippled man in the foreground is a common element in Marsh's panoply of characters. His physical handicap is a parallel to the psychological handicap of these men who have become useless through lack of employment. A solitary woman can be seen in the center of the background, out of place and almost vulnerable in the midst of these hardened men. Marsh depicted the individuality of each face in this picture without idealizing the features - he also paid close attention to the details of the surrounding city, capturing the signs and billboards advertising Tattoos, shaves, and haircuts. Marsh also produced a painting and several drawings depicting this same scene. (French version) Dans la foule, un groupe d'hommes désoeuvrés peuple cette scène nocturne de New York gravée durant la dépression des années trente. Lorsque Reginald Marsh se rend à New York en 1920, il travaille d'abord comme illustrateur et caricaturiste indépendant. Il trouve ses sujets en déambulant à travers la ville. Il se familiarise avec la ville en faisant des esquisses de ses rues et de ses habitants. A sa mort, Marsh laisse ainsi plus de 200 carnets de croquis. Ses sujets de prédilection sont les foules et les lieux de divertissement public tels que les dancings, les plages et les montagnes russes. Dans les années 1930, pendant la Dépression, il représente de nombreuses scènes de New Yorkais en situation difficile : notamment les longues files devant les boulangeries, les soupes populaires et les hommes au chômage. Dans cette gravure, des hommes sont représentés dans le quartier de Manhattan connu sous le nom de Bowery. Ils sont debouts, isolés ou rassemblés en petits groupes. Impassibles, ils semblent attendre que quelque chose se produise. Ils sont certainement sans emploi et probablement sans logis. L'infirme au premier plan est un personnage récurrent dans le répertoire de Marsh. Son handicap rappelle la difficulté psychologique de ces hommes sans travail. A l'arrière-plan, on aperçoit une femme seule: elle paraît presque vulnérable dans ce monde d'hommes. Marsh dépeint l'individualité de chaque visage. Les traits ne sont pas idéalisés. Il s'attache aussi à décrire en détail l'environnement. Il représente les affiches et les panneaux publicitaires vantant tatouages, barbiers et coiffeurs. Marsh a également réalisé un tableau et plusieurs dessins de cette même scène.

Reginald Marsh

Date: 1932

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.96

Text Entries: Born in Paris, the second son of two American artists, Reginald Marsh moved back to the United States with his family when he was two years old. His artistic career began when he attended Yale University where he became an art editor for the Yale Record and often illustrated the articles that appeared in it. Upon graduation, Marsh began free-lance illustrating for New York papers and periodicals such as the Evening Post, the Herald, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker. In the early 1920s, Marsh, who had by then earned a reputation as a master draftsman, determined to become a painter and enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied with John Sloan, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Luks. A trip to Europe in 1925 reinforced his desire to paint and at museums such as the Louvre in Paris, Marsh exhaustively studied and copied the work of Delacroix, Rubens, Titian, and Michelangelo. Back in New York, Marsh observed the individuals and crowds in the off-beat neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, around the Bowery, Third Avenue, and Fourteenth Street. He filled sketchbooks with renderings and notations of details and colors-more than 150 of these books are extant today and contain over 20,000 images-and created full-scale work back in his Fourteenth Street studio. Pip and Flip is a perfect example of Marsh at his best. The raucous crowd in front of the advertisements for the oversized exotic twins, Pip and Flip from Peru, and Major Mite, the smallest man on earth, animates the classically-balanced pyramidic composition. Marsh's expert under-drawing is visible through the transparent layers of egg-yolk tempera, a medium Marsh was introduced to by his friend Thomas Hart Benton and one that he employed in the 1930s (Marsh's quest for a color medium that would complement, not obscure, his under-drawing was lifelong). Pip and Flip offers a glimpse of Depression-era New York filtered through the lens of Marsh, a scene part reality and part fantasy.

Reginald Marsh

Date: 1935

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection.

Object number: 1995.17

Text Entries: Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop both combed New York's Union Square and the surrounding area for artistic material during the Depression. Former students of realist artist John Sloan, they were committed to depicting contemporary American life in a realistic, accessible style, but approached their common subject in different ways. Marsh's devotion to the crowded, garish and cheap places of recreation available to New Yorkers of the 1930s - including street carnivals, burlesque shows, and the spectacle of Coney Island - resembles the French Impressionists' fascination with Parisian cabarets and café-concerts sixty years earlier. Like those of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marsh's works blend a sociological approach to the "circus" of modern life with images from the artist's personal fantasies. In particular, his prolific depictions of women appear alternately sympathetic and overtly sexualized; the performer in Striptease at New Gotham, for example, appears both ostentatious and demure, and Marsh leaves the viewer in doubt as to whether her gesture of modesty, an allusion to a Hellenistic sculpture of Aphrodite, is genuine or feigned. Isabel Bishop aimed to capture an element of timelessness in the details of the lives of New York's working women. Carefully posed for passersby but momentarily absorbed in conversation or reverie, the typists in Noon Hour exude an almost classical calm. Bishop often invited young women employed as clerks, waitresses and shop girls in and around Union Square to her studio to pose. Yet Bishop, who confessed in interviews to yearning for the "warmth" she perceived to be shared among the "lower classes," also flatly described having no interest in her models' lives or personalities. As a result her lifelong commitment to realism has been criticized for lacking the strain of social critique found in the works of fellow Fourteenth Street school artists Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Raphael Soyer. Without information about either artist, would it be possible to decide which of these prints was created by a male artist and which one by a female? The answer, yes or no, rests upon cultural perceptions and assumptions about gender that have shaped the role played by "woman" - behind the canvas as well as within the frame - throughout the history of American art.

Reginald Marsh

Date: 1946

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Marjorie and Charles Benton

Object number: C1982.7a

Text Entries: Christie's New York, New York (Sale 6838, May 25, 1989): lot 364B. Ill. lot 364B, p. 374 (color).<br><br> Frank, Robin Jaffee. <i>Coney Island: Visions of An American Dreamland, 1861–2008</i>. (exh. cat., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art). New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2015. Text pp. 142, 148; ill. pl. 112ab, p.141 (color). <br><br>

Reginald Marsh

Date: 1946

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Marjorie and Charles Benton

Object number: C1982.7b

Text Entries: Christie's, New York, New York, (Sale 6838, May 25, 1989): lot 364B. Ill. lot 364B, p. 375 (color).