REGINALD MARSH
Switch Engines, Erie Yards, Jersey City, Stone No. 3.
Lithograph, 1948. 230x340 mm; 9x13½ inches, full margins. Edition of 253. Signed in pencil, lower right. Printed by George Miller, New York. Published by The Print Club of Cleveland, with the ink stamp (Lugt 2049b, verso). A very good impression.Born in Paris, the second son in a well-to-do family, Marsh (1898-1954) attended Yale University and then moved to New York where, during the early 1920s, he worked as an illustrator and took classes at the Art Students League. Marsh was equally influenced by his art teachers in New York, notably John Sloan (1871-1951), as well as American Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Old Masters such as Rubens, Titian and Tintoretto. He wholly rejected the avant-garde artistic movements gaining strength in America at the time—Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction. Instead he pursued a style that is best summed up as modern social realism: depictions of everyday life in New York, Coney Island beach scenes, vaudeville and burlesque women, the jobless on the streets of New York and the railroad yards and freight trains in New York and New Jersey. Sasowsky 30.