Reginald Marsh, Merry-Go-Round: A Double-Sided Work

Reginald Marsh was one of the few American painters who truly embraced the personality and energy of New York City. His art, which almost entirely depicts New York, is a lively social and historical record of the city in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

Even though there were many of interesting topics to research in New York, Marsh chose to paint Coney Island. In contrast to other New York sites that were often painted by painters from different schools, Coney Island had not yet been explored when Marsh started painting it. Early in his career, Marsh fell in love with Coney Island and was the first painter to fully take advantage of its flamboyant wonders, which included the surging holiday crowds, the crazy humour of Luna Park, the freaks and macabre images, the ceaseless movement of merry-go-rounds and revolving bowls, the breath-taking flight of swinging chairs, the confusion of signs, and the babel of signs.

Marsh's monumentalization and glorifying of the Coney Island entertainment and wild crowds is exemplified by Merry-Go-Round. "Marsh's crowds were not made up of faceless robots; they were individuals sharply characterised, with a gift for catching the traits that made each one unique," the artist writes. The ugliness of a great portion of the human race, the grotesqueness of middle-aged fat, the slick coarseness of young males, and the vulgar lushness of the ladies were all exploited by him. His eye was not gentle. His people did exist, and one simply had to see the typical tube throng to understand how true to reality, albeit with room for creative interpretation, his vision was."