Cynic's Progress

Years ago Rockwell Kent used to sign his splendid decorative drawings Hogarth Jr--this despite the fact that his figures are as unworldly as he knows how to make them, that his dislike of crowds makes him live in remote Ausable Forks, N. Y. and take solitary cruises to Tierra del Fuego and Greenland. A far better right to Hogarth's mantle has Reginald Marsh, who held an exhibition of his latest paintings, water colors and prints at New York's Rehn Galleries last week.

Artist Marsh, 34, has painters for parents and a sculptor for a wife. He was born in Paris where his father, Muralist Fred Dana Marsh, and his mother were studying painting. His wife, Betty Burroughs, recently had a show at the Weyhe Gallery. He was graduated from Yale in 1920, studied at the Art Student's League of New York, later under John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller. His smudgy drawings of U. S. types appear in The New Yorker, The New Masses.

Reginald Marsh is not a lady's painter. Like Hogarth, he takes crowds for his subject, vulgar, sweating, bestial crowds. He likes to see burlesque shows, dance marathons, bread lines, bathing beaches. He draws them with a line that approaches the British master in brilliance but with a color that is still as crude as his subjects. All his sympathies are reserved for locomotives. Wrote the New York Evening Post:

"In 'Locomotives Watering' there are the lyricism and unashamed romantic abandon which this type of subject evokes in this artist; human beings may be vulgar, pretentious, obvious, but a locomotive is always elegant, chic and glamorous."

Artist Marsh has followed the recent revival of interest in mural painting. Paintings shown last week were not on canvas but in tempera on panels coated with gesso. They had an obvious architectural quality. Best were "Swinging Carrousel," a tremendously forceful study of figures whirling on a Coney Island merry-go-round, and "Gaiety Burlesque," an etching of bloated faces leering at a Callipygian beauty on a runway, that was listed in the Institute of Graphic Arts' 50 prints of the year.

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