MARSH’S ICE CREAM CONES
by Libby Clay
Before the summer of 2001 ends, treat yourself to MAG’s Ice Cream Cones, courtesy of the artist Reginald Marsh (1898-1945). Center stage, four “Coney Island cuties” indulge themselves against the backdrop of the beach crowd.
The painting elicits some questions. Shouldn’t a beach scene be bright with vibrant colors? (Think of William Glackens’s Renoir-esque palette in Beach at Blue Point.) Here, Marsh’s work has a muted quality, as if the sun has been filtered through an amber lens. The colors please, but they seem to deny the gaiety and fun of an outing away from the steaming city. “Furniture polish hues,” one critic called them.
And what about those gals? Their sensuality is slyly mimicked by the shape of the cones they are holding. Why have they really come to the beach? Why are they posed, frieze-like, as if they were muses from a classical painting? Marsh, a keen observer and recorder of American life of his time, found Coney Island a favorite source, and presumably these young ladies caught his eye. Now they intrigue us.
Reginald Marsh, born in Paris and educated at Yale, loved and chose to live in New York City. Like his Ashcan School mentors, Sloan and Luks, he felt that the vitality of America was in her cities. He savored all that New York had to offer…her art galleries, her museums, her essence, her people. He haunted Coney Island and roamed the Bowery. Sketchbook in hand, he found his ideal subject matter in the sensuous and the seamy. The people recorded in his drawings represented types that might be found in the compositions of great masters like Rubens or Michelangelo.
Marsh could be called a Renaissance man; in his too-short life (he died at 47), he was a magazine illustrator, a newspaper cartoonist, a war correspondent, a teacher, a printmaker, a portraitist, and a painter of murals. (As part of the arts project of the WPA he did a major mural for the Customs House in Manhattan.) His first New York job was on the Daily News where he “made about 4000 drawings in three years.” Since the job required only one day a week of his time, he began to study painting at the Art Students League with John Sloan and later with Kenneth Hayes Miller.
His heart was with draftsmanship, however, and he never did learn to like painting in oils. He did execute creditable watercolors, mostly teaching himself. It was his friend Thomas Hart Benton who introduced Marsh to the egg tempera medium—egg yolk and powdered color on a gesso ground. (Ice Cream Cones is egg tempera on board.) Marsh found egg a fine vehicle for a draftsman, for it preserves the luminosity and clarity of a drawing, yet the greasy quality of the yolk gives an oily effect. It also dries instantly, making it easy to superimpose brushstrokes. See if you can find the hatching he applied after Ice Cream Cones dried.
Other friends introduced Marsh to “Chinese ink, Winsor Newton ‘cake’ colors and Whatman paper.” He found these materials inexpensive, no trouble (as opposed to oil painting) and very permanent. He executed a number of drawings that were exhibited at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in New York, the gallery from which Ice Cream Cones was purchased by Mrs. James Sibley Watson, Jr. (Hildegarde Lasell Watson.)
Reginald Marsh, though a favorite illustrator for such publications as Vanity Fair, Life and Harper’s Bazaar, was not fully appreciated in his time. Some critics said he was a chronicler, a recorder rather than a great creator. “These pictures are nicely executed and have humor,” one said, “but they do not rise…beyond themselves…and become than what they represent.” Marsh, however, felt art should be able to be recognized and understood by the man on the street, particularly 14th Street, and that that man should be its subject. He eschewed the new modernism that was coming to America from Paris.
Marsh revered traditional composition and technique. He studied the works of the masters assiduously. Consummate draftsman that he was, he advised aspiring artists to learn to draw heads from da Vinci, bodies from Michelangelo and Dürer, and to learn everything else from Rubens. It is ironic that he taught himself by turning back to the greats, only to have his art criticized as being pedestrian. Perhaps it was his subject matter that failed to win him the appreciation that finally came posthumously.
Ten years after his death, Newsweek has this to say about Marsh:
World War II eclipsed him and his generation, except for a few tough survivors. Regionalism gave way to internationalism. Abstraction overwhelmed the exhausted high-mindedness of social realism. Now in this cool new-minted age, when sign language is the artistic mode and rhetoric is considered emotional prostitution, how does Marsh look? The answer is a big surprise. Marsh, with his sweet-faced, large-thighed floozies walking innocent as cows through the asphalt jungle, looks good.
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