Reginald Marsh

1898–1954

Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) was born March 14, 1898, in Paris to the American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, who brought him to the United States at age two and raised him in Nutley, New Jersey. He graduated from Yale University in 1920, then studied at the Art Students League of New York under John Sloan, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Luks. Early in his career he worked as an illustrator, becoming one of the original contributing artists for The New Yorker when it launched in 1925, before turning to painting — in egg tempera, oil, watercolor, and printmaking — to document the crowded public life of Depression-era New York: Coney Island’s beaches, its burlesque houses, and the unemployed men of the Bowery, rendered, as the critic and cultural historian Morris Dickstein has observed, without the “stark iconography of exploitation, protest, and victimization” favored by contemporaries such as Ben Shahn. His best-known works include Why Not Use the “L”? (1930) and Twenty Cent Movie (1936), both now in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection. He taught at the Art Students League from 1935 until his death of a heart attack in Dorset, Vermont, on July 3, 1954.

Links: https://whitney.org/artists/841
https://americanart.si.edu/node/4225
https://www.nga.gov/artists/2644-reginald-marsh
https://emuseum.delart.org/people/154/reginald-marsh
https://collections.lacma.org/node/167956
https://www.artstudentsleague.org/legacy-of-the-league
https://whitney.org/collection/works/1559
https://whitney.org/collection/works/1560
https://morrisdickstein.com/articles/the-urban-spectacle-of-reginald-marsh

Sources: Whitney Museum of American Art. "Reginald Marsh." Accessed October 14, 2026. https://whitney.org/artists/841.

Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Reginald Marsh." Accessed October 14, 2026. https://americanart.si.edu/node/4225.

National Gallery of Art. "Reginald Marsh." Accessed October 14, 2026. https://www.nga.gov/artists/2644-reginald-marsh.

Art Students League of New York. "Legacy of the League." Accessed October 14, 2026. https://www.artstudentsleague.org/legacy-of-the-league.

Whitney Museum of American Art. "Why Not Use the ‘L’?" Collection record. Accessed October 14, 2026. https://whitney.org/collection/works/1560.

Whitney Museum of American Art. "Twenty Cent Movie." Collection record. Accessed October 14, 2026. https://whitney.org/collection/works/1559.

Dickstein, Morris. "The Urban Spectacle of Reginald Marsh." Originally published in Barbara Haskell, ed., Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York (New-York Historical Society, 2013). Accessed October 14, 2026. https://morrisdickstein.com/articles/the-urban-spectacle-of-reginald-marsh.