AN APPRECIATION: Reginald Marsh Reginald Marsh was one of the top American artists of the first half of the 20th century. While the art establishment focused on modernist abstraction, Marsh incorporated artistic principles from the Renaissance to produce depictions of contemporary life. His social realism works can be found in the the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Harvard Art Museums and the Portland Museum of Art to name a few.
Career When Marsh was born in 1898, his parents were living in Paris, France. The family was financially well-off. Both his father Fred Dana Marsh and mother Alice Randall were artists. However, making a living from art was not required as Marsh's paternal grandfather had made a fortune in the Chicago meat packing business. Marsh was two when the family moved to an artists colony in Nutley, New Jersey. Fred built a large studio and was one of the first artists to paint American industry and New York's new skyscrapers. He ha some success with his art but as reached middle age, he did little painting. Showing an early aptitude for drawing, Reg produced numerous illustrations when he was at school. His father, who surprisingly believed that art was not a paying profession, gave him no instruction. However, his mother encouraged his drawing and had him draw from plaster casts. Marsh studied art at the Yale University. At that time, the Yale Art School was still following a 19th century conservative academic curriculum. Marsh did not like it and felt that he learned more working as a cartoonist for the Yale Record. After graduating from Yale in 1920, Marsh moved to New York City. His ambition was to become a freelance illustrator. He managed to get his drawings published in several newspapers and magazines. Subsequently, he secured a job with the New York Daily News reviewing vaudeville and burlesque shows. When the New Yorker was launched in 1925, Marsh became one of the first staff members. He also contributed cartoons and illustrations to a number of magazines during this period. To develop his skills, Marsh began taking classes at the Art Students League of New York. Classes at the League kindled an interest in painting. In addition, he married fellow student Betty Burroughs in 1923. Her parents were also artists as was her brother. Marsh moved in with her family, once again living in an artistic environment. Two years later, the couple set off for Europe. Growing up among artists, Marsh had been aware of the European Old Masters from an early age. However, his taste as a young man ran to Picasso and other modern artists. Seeing the works of the Old Masters in the Louvre and in Florence was an “awe-inspiring” and Marsh vowed to learn their techniques and apply them in his own art. Marsh also met Thomas Hart Benton while in France. Benton was an American social realist who used techniques of the Baroque masters in his art. Marsh decided that he too would focus on contemporary life in his art. Returning to the Art Students League, Marsh studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller who emphasized narrative composition, perspective and figure construction. Miller also encouraged Marsh's desire to document contemporary life. Later, Marsh studied with Jacques Maroger, a former restorer at the Louvre, who had re-discovered a painting medium used by the Old Masters. Marsh had his first solo exhibition in 1924 and by the late 1920s, he had several one man exhibitions of his watercolors and lithographs. However, his work as a painter came into its own after he rented a studio on 14th Street in 1929. He had difficulty using oil paints but his discovery of egg-tempera - - a medium that was often used in the early Renaissance - - gave him the ability to produce large scale paintings. By the early 1930s, Marsh's paintings were being frequently exhibited and he was considered one of the top American artists. In 1935, he also began to teach at the Art Students League. Part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal involved projects to assist artists. One of these programs was the Treasury Relief Art Project in which the Treasury Department would pay struggling artists to work as asssiatnts to established artists in creating murals for certain federal buildings. In 1935, Marsh was selected to do two murals for the new post office building in Washington DC. This led to a project in 1937 in which Marsh created 16 murals for the rotunda of the Customs House in New York City. In 1933, Marsh was divorced. The following year, he married painter Felica Meyer whose parents were both painters. During World War II, Marsh was an artist correspondent for Life magazine and traveled to Brazil where he sketched the troops that were stationed there. Marsh published a book Anatomy For Artists in 1945. Like the Old Masters, Marsh believed that a knowledge of anatomy was important in constructing figures and in producing portraits. Indeed, like Leonardo da Vinci, he even did dissections at New York's medical colleges. In 1949, Marsh was appointed head of the department of painting at the Moore Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia. Marsh advocated that the best way to learn drawing was to study the drawings of the Old Masters. Similarly, he advised students to go to the museums and study Old Master paintings. A section of a painting that was unfinished could provide insights into how the master created the work. Marsh made seven trips to Europe between 1926 and 1953 in order to copy the great paintings in Europe's museums. Marsh was chosen to receive the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in the Spring of 1954. However, he died from a heart attack in July of that year. Analysis Marsh's work focuses primarily on New York City and its people. He was fascinated by the city's buildings and structures. However, his main interest was in depicting its people going about their daily activities. Although he was from an upper class background, his depictions of that class are mostly satirical. He found the working class and the poor much more interesting and they dominate his work. His depictions were not political but rather documentations of life in New York City in the 20s, 30s and 40s. The works were not always flattering. He often showed the vulgarity of popular culture and the absurdity of some relationships. Although he was a stickler for realism, there is an element of cartoon-like exaggeration into some of his characterizations. Rooted in his days as a reviewer for the Daily News, a subject that Marsh often addressed was the city's burlesque shows. Although there is often nudity in these pictures, they are not erotic. Rather, they show a cold environment in which the women performers are distant and isolated from the men. The same is true of his works depicting prostitutes and their clients. In depicting the people of the city, Marsh drew on his knowledge of the Old Masters. Pictures of crowds on the subway or at Coney Island are composed as in a Renaissance frieze. Figures are drawn using principles of proportion and anatomical structure developed in the Renaissance. As a result, the common people of 20th century New York are given the same stature as the heroes depicted by the Renaissance masters. Marsh also liked to depict the glories of his time. Having spent his summers as a boy by the sea in Rhode Island, Marsh had a great love of the the sea and ships. The port of New York was having a golden age during this period and one of Marsh's favorite subjects was the waterfront. Along the same lines, he liked to depict steam locomotives and complained that trains were no longer fun to draw when diesel engines began to replace the locomotives in the late 1940s. In order to collect material for his paintings, Marsh would walk throughout the city carrying a camera and a sketchbook. He took thousands of photos and filled hundreds of sketchbooks. Later, he would use this material in his studio in creating paintings. However, he did not merely copy photos or sketches. He preferred to use his imagination in composing works. |
The two murals done for the post office building in Washington DC. The mural above shows workers processing the mail while the one below shows the mail being trasnferred from an ocean liner to a boat that will take it ashore.
Above: Drawing of a woman done in Chinese ink.
A sketch of Marsh painting by Valda, who was one of his students.
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Artist appreciation - Reginald Marsh