?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
REGINALD MARSH Sheet of Figure Studies.
Pencil on wove paper, circa 1940. 226x303 mm; 8 7/8x12 inches. Initialed in pencil, lower left recto, and signed in ink, lower right recto.
Property of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sold to benefit the Acquisitions Fund (819.1963). Gifted by Dorothy Williams Garrett Bequest in memory of her husband Garet Garrett.
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.
