Exhibition - "Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York"...

Exhibition - "Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York"

The exhibition entitled, "Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York" exemplified the true grit of a bygone era. Featuring common New York folks as the backdrop for the period, the vivid use of color and painted strokes visually captures the mood of the time.

The animation of the art flows easily throughout the densely filled canvas with each image being it's own story. Marsh was able to embody the social and economic hardships of the time with the hardened glamour and simple humanity found in subway riders and burlesque queens.

His subjects were not glamorous or affluent New Yorkers, but those in the middle and lower class—Bowery bums, burlesque queens, Coney Island musclemen, park denizens, subway riders and post-flapper era sirens. Marsh was fascinated by the crass glamour, gaudiness and sexuality these city inhabitants exhibited in public, as well as by the humanity expressed by those living under severe economic and social duress... The result was a sequential unfolding of episodes across his canvas surfaces, which evoked the transience, motion and vitality of New York City in the 1930s.

2013 Estate of Reginald Marsh/Art Students League/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.