Tattoo parlors, sketchy barber shops, and shady characters hanging around an all-night Bowery mission are all part of painter Reginald Marsh’s “Tattoo and Haircut,” completed in 1932.
Marsh’s paintings typically feature the city’s marginalized Depression-era outcasts.
“What interested Marsh was not the individuals in a crowd, but the crowd itself … In their density and picturesqueness, they recall the crowds in the movies of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra,” wrote Marilyn Cohen in Reginald Marsh’s New York.
Tags: Bowery Bums, New York in 1935, New York in the Depression, New York painters, Reginald Marsh, Reginald Marsh's New York, Social Realism painters, Tattoo and Haircut
Ephemeral New York 
June 18, 2012 at 5:57 pm |
In the same way I loved Times Square not for the availability of cheap sex everywhere you turned but the mass of humanity thronging the streets practically on top of each other. I can still remember crowded Broadway one Saturday night and 42nd and 43rd Streets, the crowd could barely get through, each person was on top of the other or so it seemed. To me that was certainly sexual, you could hear yourself and another person cuming in the crowd… To me that was bliss.
June 18, 2012 at 6:10 pm |
I am talking about 1968-69 or thereabouts when Times Square and NYC was a very human scene and not like it is now.
June 19, 2012 at 7:02 pm |
I don’t know if I have ever agreed with the idea that Marsh was “not interested” in the individuals in the crowd. Just look at the details, just look at the unique qualities of each face. Sorry, I choose to disagree.
June 19, 2012 at 7:09 pm |
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