Art: Make Mine Manhattan

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No. 1 Union Square, New York City, looks like a run-down office building. For Painter Reginald Marsh it is an ivory tower, with its feet planted firmly in the Manhattan market place. Marsh, a retiring 50-year-old chunk of a man, spends whole days at his studio window on the top floor, surveys the square below through a telescope. The caved-in bums, bundled up news vendors and bumptious, pneumatic-looking shopgirls that catch his eye are swiftly translated into notebook sketches and filed away in a steel cabinet.

Packed in with them, cheek by jowl, are the burlesque queens, taxi-dance-hall hostesses and Coney Island athletes that Marsh finds on his favorite excursions. Coney Island, says Marsh happily, is "the only place where you can see a million people at once, spread out for you like on a table."

Sometimes, as happened last week, Marsh's cast of characters appears uptown, in a thick-carpeted gallery. He presents them in big, delicate drawings done with a brush and Chinese ink, and oils gleaming with thin glazes of subdued color. He worries continually about his methods, buttonholes fellow painters for advice. "I never know just how to go about a picture," he explains. "Each one takes a new focus."

Marsh records Manhattan in the lusty, busty style that Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson used to capture 18th Century London. He lacks Rowlandson's genius for caricature, but in draftsmanship, technical skill and honesty of observation Marsh is easily his peer.

One of the drawings in last week's exhibition—showing two windblown cuties on the Coney Island boardwalk—was done overlooking a Vermont stone quarry. "It would have made a beautiful landscape," Marsh recalled, "but not for me to paint. A couple of farmers peered over my shoulder while I worked, wondering where the devil I saw the invisible girls."

To Marsh, most modern art is "phony sub-primitivism. Critics may not know what's wrong with Picasso, but any layman can tell you. The question is, what does it mean?" Questioned as to the meaning of his own work, Marsh says with a faintly puzzled air that it means what it describes—New York. "This is a new city, wide-open to an artist. It offers itself."