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Reginald Marsh
American, 1898-1954
Reginald Marsh was born in an apartment in Paris above the Café du Dome. He was the second son born to parents who were both artists. His mother, Alice Randall was a miniaturist painter and his father, Frederick Dana Marsh. The family was well off. When Marsh was two years old, his family moved to Nutley, New Jersey, where his father acquired a studio home located on The Enclosure, a street that had been established as an artists' colony some decades earlier by the American painter Frank Fowler.
Marsh attended the Lawrenceville School and graduated in 1920 from Yale University. At Yale Art School he worked as the star illustrator and cartoonist for campus humor magazine "The Yale Record". He moved to New York after graduation. In 1922 he was hired to sketch vaudeville and burlesque performers for a regular "New York Daily News" feature. When "The New Yorker" began publication in 1925, Marsh wase among the magazine's first cartoonists. Although not primarily remembered as a cartoonist, he was a prolific and thoughtful contributor to "The New Yorker" from 1925 to 1944. He also created illustrations for the New Masses (an American Marxist journal published from the 1920s to the 1940s. In 1921, to begin taking classes at the Art Students League of New York. By 1923 Marsh began to paint seriously. Marsh then studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller and George Luks, and chose to do fewer commercial assignments. Miller, who taught at the Art Students League of New York, instructed Marsh on the basics of form and design, and encouraged Marsh to make himself known to the world. Marsh's style can best be described as social realism. His work depicted the Great Depression and a range of social classes whose division was accentuated by the economic crash. His figures are generally treated as types. "What interested Marsh was not the individuals in a crowd, but the crowd itself ... Marsh's main attractions were the burlesque stage, the hobos on the Bowery, crowds on city streets and at Coney Island, and women. His deep devotion to the old masters led to his creating works of art in a style that reflects certain artistic traditions, and his work often contained religious metaphors. Marsh was obsessed with the American woman as a sexual and powerful figure. In the 1930s during the Great Depression, more than 2 million women lost their jobs, and women were said to be exploited sexually. Marsh's work shows this exploitation by portraying men and women in the same paintings.
During the 1940s and for many years Reginald Marsh became an important teacher at the Art Students League of New York, which ran a summer camp where Marsh's students included Roy Lichtenstein. In the 40s Marsh began making drawings for magazines such as Esquire, Fortune, and Life.
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