Art: Manhattan Portrait

The late Reginald Marsh was a short, stocky, inconspicuous man, who for 34 memorable years moved quietly and almost invisibly about Manhattan with sketch pad and fountain pen. When he died last year at 56, the graphic record he left behind told what he had best loved and captured: the big city with its derelict Bowery bums, jaded burlesque queens and their wise-guy following of touts and sports, the day-to-day lives of Manhattan’s anonymous masses, and everywhere—lolling on the beaches, powdering their noses in the mirror of a subway gum machine or just striding, windblown, under the “L”—the proud, full-bosomed, round-rumped, bulging-calfed girls Marsh made his own. From Marsh’s mountainous pile of sketchbooks, drawings, engravings, etchings and paintings. Manhattan’s Whitney Museum of American Art has chosen 160 examples for its current Marsh retrospective show.

“Stare, Stare, Stare.” From the beginning it was almost inevitable that Marsh should devote his life to art. Born over a small cafe on Paris’ Left Bank, the son of artist parents, Marsh was drawing before he was three. After Lawrenceville and Yale (’20), he got his first job as an artist for the New York Daily News, doing city scenes and theater sketches which, for Marsh, “took the place of an art school.” When Marsh was 27. a trip to Paris and an introduction to the Louvre’s old masters turned him seriously to painting.

Marsh later passed on to his students the lessons he learned from Renaissance art:

“For the head, copy and learn by heart the heads of Da Vinci; for the body, Michelangelo and Durer; for everything, Rubens.” Having learned from art, Marsh turned to life: “Go out into the streets, stare at the people. Go into the subway. Stare at the people. Stare, stare, keep on staring.”

Millions of Nudes. Always essentially an illustrator, Marsh followed in the Ash Can tradition pioneered by John Sloan and Robert Henri. Like them he was possessed by the lure of the big city: “It offers itself. New York is a new city. You can’t touch London or Paris that way.”

Out of his own observation of metropolitan life came the low-life city scenes that made him famous, including a painting of Dillinger’s death and sketches of the Jelke trial for LIFE, For some of his best material he went to the Bowery (“You can’t find any thing better to draw”) and burlesque houses (“Extremely pictorial. You get a woman in the spotlight, the gilt archi tecture of the place, plenty of human ity”). Coney Island fascinated him: “Crowds of people in all directions, in all positions, without clothing, moving — like the great compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens. I failed to find anything like it in Europe.”

¶Sex in all its public forms fascinated Marsh. For sardonic effect he sometimes reproduced in his paintings Manhattan’s steady flow of tabloid headlines (DOES THE SEX URGE EXPLAIN JUDGE CRATER’S STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE?). But above the litter and trash of the streets, Marsh saw in the full-blown women the galvanizing, poetic image of the city. He painted them as triumphant nudes, only incidentally clothed, proud symbols with painted, empty faces.

Only Monroes. Marsh worked with oils, tempera, mural painting and watercolors. But in Chinese ink wash drawings, he discovered late in life his freest, most effective medium, achieving a rich, baroque feeling surpassing that of his earlier works. In later years, as honors were piled upon him, he mourned the passing of the New York he pictured. Crumped Marsh: “The new lampposts are not so good to look at. You can’t tell an aquarium from the United Nations any more.” At Coney Island, “the bunions and varicose veins and the flat chests are gone. Now there are only Marilyn Monroes.” Marsh need not have worried about his own work ever being out of date. It caught and held the spirit and the look of an era in much the same way that other times were recorded by Rowlandson and Hogarth, the two social portraitists Marsh came closest to rivaling.