Reginald Marsh

Mr. and Mrs. Garson Kanin, New York
Forum Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Florida

Garson Kanin, "Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon:  The Turtle Bay House of the Writers of 'Adam's Rib' and 'Pat and Mike', Architectural Digest, April, 1992, p. 166, illustrated

SURFACE: in fairly good condition; heavy craquelure throughout UNDER ULTRA VIOLET: figure is clean; scattered craquelure fill-in throughout
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A painting of a World War II soldier appears on the reverse.

While the endless variety of New York City’s street life and its inhabitants was Marsh’s preferred subject matter throughout his career, he was particularly captivated from the start by the performers and the audiences of the city’s vaudeville and burlesque houses.  In fact, one of his first jobs after moving to the city in the early 1920s was as staff artist for the New York Daily News, where he made his mark as a chronicler of vaudeville shows.

Burlesque, from 1945, depicts a show from the stage of the Hudson Burlesk House in Union City, New Jersey.  There is a stark contrast between the bright, flesh-hued and scantily dressed burlesque queen as she unabashedly performs her solitary dance and the dark, shadowy male onlookers in the background, who salaciously watch her. 

The role of the theatergoer as voyeur had been explored in earlier generations.  Edgar Degas and Toulouse Lautrec in France in the late 19^th century and later, members of the Ashcan School in New York, particularly Everett Shinn, developed this theatrical motif in their work.  Edward Hopper, a close friend of Marsh, also visited this theme in Girlie Show (1941,  private collection).  Carol Troyen writes, "Reginald Marsh, who frequented burlesque houses both as a patron and in search of material, made sexual display and the attendant environment the focus of his art.  Marsh's burlesque queens from the 1930s and 1940s are usually depicted as attractive, confident women.  He portrayed them as goddesses, frequently in poses derived from classical statuary....[In works such as Burlesque], the curvaceous blond stripper...is half Jean Harlow, half Venus Pudica--which makes her seem all the more commanding in comparison with a sea of joyless males at her feet.  This contrast between larger-than-life alluring women and pathetic, ineffectual men--may have had roots in Marsh's own insecurities but also mirrored the complexities of sexual relations in the 1930s.  In Marsh's world only women work, but in occupations in which the sole qualification is their sexuality....[Marsh's] women radiate sexual experience" (Carole Troyen, "Hopper's Women", Edward Hopper, Boston, 2007)