Social realist artist Reginald Marsh has painted Coney Island burlesque performers, sailors and soldiers, forgotten men at lonely docks and Bowery dives, sideshow gawkers, subway riders, and sexily dressed men and women carousing and enjoying the playground that is 1920s and 1930s Manhattan after dark.
But “Manhattan Bridge,” from 1938, is different. It’s a portrait of a muscular bridge and the ordinary, solitary New Yorkers who walk across it—figures not with Marsh’s usual exaggerated expressions but with their backs turned toward us, unglamorous and getting to where they are going.
Tags: Manhattan Bridge Paintings, New York in the 1930s, Reginald Marsh Artist, Reginald Marsh Manhattan Bridge, Reginald Marsh NYC Paintings, Reginald Marsh WPA Depression
Ephemeral New York 
May 16, 2022 at 6:13 am |
Architecture and urban infrastructure are his real strength.
May 16, 2022 at 10:41 am |
Thank you for highlighting Reginald Marsh. That painting is beautiful.
I was lucky to work in a Washington DC building with a pair of Marsh murals he painted with the WPA. One shows mail being unloaded in the NY harbor (I think) and the other, my favorite, shows mail being processed in the bowels of Penn Station (I think, because I recognize the iron work stair rails).
May 16, 2022 at 3:58 pm |
You can see Reginald Marsh murals in New York City, too—in the Custom House building at Broadway and the Battery. It’s hard to take good photos of them but they are lovely:
https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/u-s-custom-house-murals-new-york-ny/
May 18, 2022 at 8:17 pm |
Marsh was often considered one of the “social realist” painters of the 1930s. Those artists usually idealized workers and often showed them as underdogs in exploitative situations. Here, though, The Machine seems to be “winning” in that the structures of the bridges reach upward, if toward something less than ideal. And, as the editor of this blog points out, the people are just going about their business: cogs in the machine, if you will. The forms and colors help to capture all of this. Good stuff.
Interesting fact: Marsh later taught at the Art Students’ League. They ran a summer camp, in which Marsh also taught. One of his campers, if you will, was a student named Roy Lichtenstein.
May 19, 2022 at 5:34 pm |
I love your thoughts on this painting; cogs in the machine is exactly what I was hoping to get across. And I never knew that about Roy Lichtenstein. I’ve been meaning to do a post on his Times Square subway mural:
https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/artwork_show?36