Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

During his early career as an illustrator and cartoonist, Reginald Marsh took to prowling Manhattan's streets with sketch pad in hand. Humanity's urban species fascinated him, steering him to spots where New Yorkers paraded or commingled in all their irrepressible variety. Times Square, Coney Island, and 14th Street became familiar haunts, but promising material also issued from his forays into subway stations, Bowery dives, and burlesque parlors. The drawings accumulated from these rambles (sometimes supplemented by site photographs Marsh also produced) provided a fountainhead of impressions for the artist to rework later in his studio overlooking Union Square.¹ Combining ebullient draftsmanship, skillful caricature, and keenly observed detail, these vignettes often feigned a tabloid style to parody New York's social foibles and unbridled commercialism.

Harris Theater pokes fun at the public's growing obsession with the "silver screen." During the 1930s and 1940s, Marsh took note of the distinctive visual culture developing around New York City's proliferating motion-picture palaces. He was particularly intrigued by their charming ticket-booth clerks, flashing marquees, plastering of lurid posters and headlines, and lines of expectant patrons looking every bit as theatrical as the attractions they were priming to see. Marsh recycled these elements in a series of scenes devoted to Times Square's movie houses.

The Harris Theater, opened in 1914, had George M. Cohan and his partner, Sam Harris, as early tenants.² Like other movie theaters in the vicinity, it had enjoyed a run as a playhouse specializing in musicals and revues before management abandoned these pursuits to woo a new clientele preoccupied with Hollywood and continuous double features. The Depression triggered the conversion of many Broadway houses into inexpensive movie theaters in an effort to preserve patronage. Those traditional playhouses that remained found themselves increasingly relegated to the side streets off Times Square.

This busy watercolor depicts the sidewalk spectacle outside the theater's entrance at 226 West 42nd Street. The crowd milling in front, interspersed with several passersby, is typical of the proletariat figures that peopled Marsh's art. The women, dressed to please according to the latest gospel of working-class taste, flaunt their curvaceous charms. The men -coarser in appearance -tend to be caught more off guard, ogling "dames," slouching against walls, or shambling through a city of hollow employment prospects.³ The billboard above the box office not only displays names of screen stars of the period but also provides wry predictions of the fate awaiting the unwary in Marsh's sexually predatory city. As if to test viewers' perceptivity, a comely duo walking past the theater at the far right confront us with curious or perhaps inviting stares, reminding us of the scenarios that flirtatious dalliances lead to in Marsh's fictitious movie world.

Shifting among pen and pencil, egg tempera, watercolor, and oils, Marsh continually experimented with different media in his efforts to pictorialize New York. In the 1930s alone, he studied fresco and sculpture, purchased a Leica camera, refined his etching and lithography skills, and mastered the "Maroger medium," an emulsion technique derived from painting methods of the old masters. At heart a graphic artist who preferred fluid lines to disciplined color effects, he found Chinese ink the most versatile vehicle for conveying the city's helter-skelter rhythms and sometimes used it, in combination with charcoal, washes, and other materials, to produce striking views of New York in grisaille. The Bowery (acc. no. 53.107.2) and Steeplechase Park, Coney Island (acc. no. 53.107.1), two large drawings dating to 1944 that Marsh presented to the Museum of the City of New York in 1953, demonstrate his bravura achievements in such mixed media.⁴ The Museum's paintings collection also contains the artist's energetic preparatory studies for the United States Custom House fresco cycle, a series of eight vignettes executed in the late 1930s that depict New York Harbor in its international glory days.

Notes:

1 In addition to using a camera and countless on-the-spot sketches as compositional aids, Marsh equipped his ninth-floor studio on Union Square with binoculars and a telescope, enabling him to focus closely on unsuspecting people spotted on nearby rooftops and the streets below.

2 The Harris Theater, designed by renowned theater architect Thomas W. Lamb, was built by the Candler family from a fortune made on Coca-Cola. The facility debuted with motion pictures in May 1914 but quickly turned to live musicals, at which point it acquired the name "Cohan and Harris." Sam Harris assumed exclusive control of the operation in 1921, when the house was renamed after him alone. The Shubert theatrical empire assumed control of the Harris in the mid-1920s but relinquished the house to movie operations in the 1930s.

3 For an in-depth analysis of Marsh's attitude toward contemporary urban women, see Ellen Wiley Todd, The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1993). Marsh's career has been well documented by modern scholars, and numerous sources citing Marsh's activities as chronicler of New York during the Depression and World War II can be found in the Museum Archives.

4 Harris Theater was the third in this trio of New York City scenes that Marsh donated to the Museum following an enthusiastic solicitation by Grace Mayer, the Museum's founding curator of prints and photographs, who remained on staff until 1958.


Harris Theater, New York 1940 Reginald Marsh (1898 -1954) Watercolor on Whatman paper, 27 X 40 3/8 Signed lower right: Reginald Marsh, 1940 Gift of the artist, 53.107.3
During his early career as an illustrator and cartoonist, Reginald Marsh took to prowling Manhattan's streets with sketch pad in hand. Humanity's urban species fascinated him, steering him to spots where New Yorkers paraded or commingled in all their irrepressible variety. Times Square, Coney Island, and 14th Street became familiar haunts, but promising material also issued from his forays into subway stations, Bowery dives, and burlesque parlors. The drawings accumulated from these rambles (sometimes supplemented by site photographs Marsh also produced) provided a fountainhead of impressions for the artist to rework later in his studio overlooking Union Square.¹ Combining ebullient draftsmanship, skillful caricature, and keenly observed detail, these vignettes often feigned a tabloid style to parody New York's social foibles and unbridled commercialism. Harris Theater pokes fun at the public's growing obsession with the "silver screen." During the 1930s and 1940s, Marsh took note of the distinctive visual culture developing around New York City's proliferating motion-picture palaces. He was particularly intrigued by their charming ticket-booth clerks, flashing marquees, plastering of lurid posters and headlines, and lines of expectant patrons looking every bit as theatrical as the attractions they were priming to see. Marsh recycled these elements in a series of scenes devoted to Times Square's movie houses. The Harris Theater, opened in 1914, had George M. Cohan and his partner, Sam Harris, as early tenants.² Like other movie theaters in the vicinity, it had enjoyed a run as a playhouse specializing in musicals and revues before management abandoned these pursuits to woo a new clientele preoccupied with Hollywood and continuous double features. The Depression triggered the conversion of many Broadway houses into inexpensive movie theaters in an effort to preserve patronage. Those traditional playhouses that remained found themselves increasingly relegated to the side streets off Times Square. This busy watercolor depicts the sidewalk spectacle outside the theater's entrance at 226 West 42nd Street. The crowd milling in front, interspersed with several passersby, is typical of the proletariat figures that peopled Marsh's art. The women, dressed to please according to the latest gospel of working-class taste, flaunt their curvaceous charms. The men -coarser in appearance -tend to be caught more off guard, ogling "dames," slouching against walls, or shambling through a city of hollow employment prospects.³ The billboard above the box office not only displays names of screen stars of the period but also provides wry predictions of the fate awaiting the unwary in Marsh's sexually predatory city. As if to test viewers' perceptivity, a comely duo walking past the theater at the far right confront us with curious or perhaps inviting stares, reminding us of the scenarios that flirtatious dalliances lead to in Marsh's fictitious movie world. Shifting among pen and pencil, egg tempera, watercolor, and oils, Marsh continually experimented with different media in his efforts to pictorialize New York. In the 1930s alone, he studied fresco and sculpture, purchased a Leica camera, refined his etching and lithography skills, and mastered the "Maroger medium," an emulsion technique derived from painting methods of the old masters. At heart a graphic artist who preferred fluid lines to disciplined color effects, he found Chinese ink the most versatile vehicle for conveying the city's helter-skelter rhythms and sometimes used it, in combination with charcoal, washes, and other materials, to produce striking views of New York in grisaille. The Bowery (acc. no. 53.107.2) and Steeplechase Park, Coney Island (acc. no. 53.107.1), two large drawings dating to 1944 that Marsh presented to the Museum of the City of New York in 1953, demonstrate his bravura achievements in such mixed media.⁴ The Museum's paintings collection also contains the artist's energetic preparatory studies for the United States Custom House fresco cycle, a series of eight vignettes executed in the late 1930s that depict New York Harbor in its international glory days. Notes: 1 In addition to using a camera and countless on-the-spot sketches as compositional aids, Marsh equipped his ninth-floor studio on Union Square with binoculars and a telescope, enabling him to focus closely on unsuspecting people spotted on nearby rooftops and the streets below. 2 The Harris Theater, designed by renowned theater architect Thomas W. Lamb, was built by the Candler family from a fortune made on Coca-Cola. The facility debuted with motion pictures in May 1914 but quickly turned to live musicals, at which point it acquired the name "Cohan and Harris." Sam Harris assumed exclusive control of the operation in 1921, when the house was renamed after him alone. The Shubert theatrical empire assumed control of the Harris in the mid-1920s but relinquished the house to movie operations in the 1930s. 3 For an in-depth analysis of Marsh's attitude toward contemporary urban women, see Ellen Wiley Todd, The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1993). Marsh's career has been well documented by modern scholars, and numerous sources citing Marsh's activities as chronicler of New York during the Depression and World War II can be found in the Museum Archives. 4 Harris Theater was the third in this trio of New York City scenes that Marsh donated to the Museum following an enthusiastic solicitation by Grace Mayer, the Museum's founding curator of prints and photographs, who remained on staff until 1958.