Tattoo-Shave-Haircut

Reginald Marsh's most famous and successful etching, Tattoo-Shave-Haircut evokes the sordid reality of the Bowery, a small area near the southern tip of New York City's Manhattan Island known since the late nineteenth century as the quintessential "skid row": a resort of the hungry, the homeless, and the downtrodden. The Depression-era scene beneath the "El" (elevated train) shows a crowd of men loitering near the brightly lit signs of a combined tattoo parlor-barber shop and an "All Night Mission" where a bed and a meal were offered for the price of listening to a sermon. A network of densely drawn lines articulates the sturdy girders supporting the El tracks, which serve as a canopy for the visual cacophony of urban life on the sidewalk below. A man hobbles on a crutch in the foreground; in the left background, a blonde woman appears, an unlikely pedestrian in this coarse underground world from which there appears no escape.

His pocket sketchbook always in hand, Marsh took every opportunity to draw the people and city scenes he encountered. Tattoo-Shave-Haircut is not a transcription of an actual scene the artist observed, however, but a composite of several sketches and studies. Marsh labored over the image on the plate, taking it through ten states before he considered it ready to print. This impression is numbered 19 of the 31 impressions Marsh printed between 1932 and 1934. In 1932, the artist also painted a version of this scene, entitled Tattoo and Haircut (Art Institute of Chicago). Beginning early in the twentieth century, the haunts of urban down-and-outs attracted progressive artists, many of whom lived in or near such locales in New York City. With a sympathetic realism similar to Marsh's approach in Tattoo and Haircut, Raphael Soyer portrayed typical denizens of a Bowery refuge in The Mission (TF 1996.66), and Glenn Coleman showed run-down buildings fronting El tracks as the setting for a spontaneous demonstration by members of the urban underclass in his work Bonfire (TF 1996.67).

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, August 1999.

On Process: The American Print, Technique Examined, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 2, 2001.

Paris-New York, aller-retour. Une Modernité américaine en formation, 1875–1940. Oeuvres des collections de la Terra Foundation for the Arts et des Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens (Paris-New York, Roundtrip. American Modernism in the Making, 1875–1940. Works from the Terra Foundation for the Arts and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, September 15–November 30, 2002. [exh. cat.]Terra Collection-in-Residence, Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 15, 2022–September 30, 2026.

 

Craven, Thomas, ed. A Treasury of American Prints: A Selection of One Hundred Etchings and Lithographs by the Foremost Living American Artists. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. Pl. 71 (text and ill.).

Sasowsky, Norman. Reginald Marsh: Etchings, Engravings, Lithographs. New York: Praeger, 1956.

Sasowsky, Norman. The Prints of Reginald Marsh. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1976. Text pp. 27, 39; ill. p. 180, no. 140, p. 181.

Jacobowitz, Ellen S. and George H. Marcus. American Graphics, 1860–1940: Selected from the Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982. No. 93, p. 97.

American Printmakers, 1860–1950. Chicago, Illinois: R. S. Johnson Fine Art, 1987. No. 69; ill. cover.

Master Prints of Five Centuries: The Alan and Marianne Schwartz Collection. (exh. cat., The Detroit Institute of Arts). Detroit, Michigan: Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts, 1990, p. 96.

Tattoo-Shave Haircut, Reginald Marsh. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, August 1999. Ill. (black & white). [specific reference to Terra print]

Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. American Moderns, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Ill. no. 11, p. 67 (black & white). [specific reference to Terra print]

Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. L'Amérique et les modernes, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Ill. no. 11, p. 67 (black & white). [specific reference to Terra print]

Griffith, Bronwyn and Lee A. Vedder. Paris-New York, aller-retour (New York-Paris Round Trip). (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2002. Text p. 32 (French), 91 (English), 107 (checklist); fig. 11, p. 31 (color). [specific reference to Terra print]

Haskell, Barbara, ed. Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York. New York: New–York Historical Society, 2012. Text, pp.101–102.