Art: Assistant Clerk

An artist much favored by the New Deal is bullnecked Reginald Marsh, Yale graduate, Associate of the National Academy of Design, painter of burlesque shows, locomotives, Coney Island. Out of the mass of New Deal art contracts, Artist Marsh has received enough to keep him almost continuously employed for the past three years, his best known murals being narrow panels of unloading mail sacks in Washington’s new Post Office.

One space that Muralist Marsh has long itched to fill is the 30-year-old dome of Manhattan’s Custom House, as fine a public expanse of plaster as any frescoer could itch for. He prepared a series of eight sketches, showing scenes of a liner (Queen Mary) entering New York Harbor, taking the pilot aboard, warping into her pier, discharging freight, etc.

The sketches were enthusiastically approved by Harry M. Durning, Collector of Customs for the Port of New York, but brakes recently applied on some forms of Federal expenditure stalled the project. Last week a compromise was effected. Artist Marsh, insisting that he was “keen as hell” to get his mural up at almost any price had himself enrolled as an Assistant Clerk in the Treasury Department’s Procurement Division, salary 90¢ an hour, $1,560 a year, to paint his picture. Under him will be six assistants, listed as “artists” and drawing $1.60 an hour for a 15-hour week. The 2,500 square feet of dry fresco will take about three months to finish. At his normal rate of self-valuation Assistant Clerk Marsh’s commission for a mural of this size would be $40,000.