Marsh

In the Flesh

Never trust what an artist says. Only look at what they do, and what it makes you feel. What it does to change your life around for the better. You have to interpret and analyze the work with a withering eye. You just have to do that, if they 're to appear in clear relief. What you feel on your own, and not what a critic says, or what the artist says.

In all cases feeling rules. It is the major arbiter of taste for an independent like me. Art rules my daily life, and makes it possible for me to have a rush a minute. My feeling becomes my art, as I borrow from the very fine Reginald Marsh.

Marsh draws in a masterful way. He also takes pretty good pictures with his camera.. At all times, he is driven to understand something. It may be the female form. He draws the female beautifully. Reginald Marsh, nineteen-thirties painter and drawing master, cares about recording the female form.

He is a very intelligent, sensitive human, as many who draw and paint are. He is attuned to his physical environment and understands the permutations his society is going through, the Depression, and some very hard times in and around New York.

It may be that he is, in the whole body of his work, trying to understand his society like a sociologist would. To say something like, the times were hard but the human spirit still parties and celebrates. His work is his sociological statement. He is not a Marxist or apologist for capitalism. He just says "fact," and moves to the next image in his great head.

His generation, living in the thirties, is the first to market sex in the city, away from the village that folks had just recently left. The phenomenon of urban migration was to change our country in innumerable ways. So he records the mass places where sex is on parade. The burlesk, the beach and the street. The taxi dance halls and the marathon dance contests. Always just sketching reality with his own spin, but not saying the times are especially good or bad. Not blaming the government for seriously screwing up, but just documenting the times and the momentous changes. He shows a clear eye in a greatly troubled time.

After all, something big did happen. Humans left for the big cities and brought their needs along. We became an urban nation. And the advertising industry cranked it up a notch and sold time on radio that reached the whole country and the billboards grew on the side of roads. Mass advertising was about to make a great leap forward. It learned quickly to market sex, the same sex that in the village occurred in the fields where animals mated openly and in closed spaces of barn and bush and dark room, where humans from time's beginning did it, took sex, in the setting of the hamlet or the village.

Now the creative advertising thinkers figured out a way to sell Pepsodent toothpaste to enhance appearance and make one more attractive. City promoters took the female form and staged burlesk shows to capitalize. Taxi dance halls grew to take the dimes of horny men who would take a turn on the floor with a bored maiden. The beaches witnessed a new and unveiled form of display that would leave Marsh and others lookers breathless. Sex was in, thank god. That was fact and the Depression could do nothing to stop it. Only it, the sex, could make the Great Depression livable.

Marsh does not just record history in the form of sketching women and some men less than fully clothed. He filters the forms through his very active brain and interprets. He places his figures in a social context. Surrounded by the bread lines, strange signs, lamposts and merrygoround horses.

He takes normal bodies and makes them into heroic bodies found in the aerobic studio, belonging to professional muscle-types. He does not reproduce the human form accurately, whatever that may mean. He does not draw what the photograph shows as anatomical reality. He understands that reality because he has spent thousands of hours learning it, through the reproduction of the masters of art over the centuries. He draws awfully well. One cannot dispute that. He heroizes the human figure, as to conform to an image in his head. He takes average persons and mythicises them. I don't know why except that he likes it. It makes him think he is Rubens or Titian in the Bowery or beach of New York's thirties.

He takes the most wonderful photos. They rank with my all-time favorites. I don't think they are remarkable for any one quality. It is their commonness I like so much. I just like them an awful lot. The two woman friends on the beach, the two male acrobatics on the sand. His frozen custard stand at Coney Island. I like his photographic compositions. The photos are clean and attractive. Why did he have to muck it all up with his big paintings? He ends up sketching and painting something altogether different. He calls it his art. Based on the photos, some things emerge I can't begin to like and to understand. He paints his unconscious and I don't like Marsh's unconscious. To be honest I don't think I would like anyone's unconscious. I mean, why can't artists leave it where it belongs, let it lie?

He takes the separate images he photographs or draws, and makes a composite painting. These last are large and busy pieces. I don't like his big works, not the energy, the color, or the overall impression. It is madness pictorialized, and, in truth, he may be a little nuts. Nothing to worry over. He too, will die, and leave us alone. His big works at the beach are what he is famed for. I think Marsh did it, to stand out, and not because he thought they were such hot works of art. They are not his best work as far as I am concerned. He does better when he reproduces little things, worlds of two people or one against an object like a lamppost or a sign. The small pictures, the sketches and etchings, are for himself only and they are for me too. They make me so very happy.

Maybe he had to fit a little into the spirit of the times, and that meant he had to show the Bowery and the Coney Island beach and the street of New York in its very own confusion and jumble. He felt he had to depict a mass setting. He did this to his disadvantage I feel, with large paintings that have figures that seem to move under the paint, squirming to free themselves from the surface of the work and from the unconscious mind of the painter.

He looks to earlier centuries for painters to emulate so as to get the anatomy of the human down right. He seems to understand something about the Europe of earlier times.

He takes the Masters, whom he can reproduce faithfully, and puts new clothes on them and draws or sketches them into a small frame, one person or two against a discreet background. His genius is there. In the individualized and small sketches, etchings or paintings.

When he then takes these glorious humans and transports them into a massed nightmare, I lose him and quickly turn the page of the huge art book, his pal of youth, Lloyd Goodrich, produced.

Marsh is important to me, as I confront my life from age 9 or so, to the time I went to college at 18. All the summers spent at the rides and games of the amusement park at Nantasket Beach. Working or hanging around . All the time. Hours and hours of the noise and the walkers and the smells of taffy and fluff spun, hotdogs, fried clams, smelly barrrooms, pick-up joints, where I peddled the newspapers of the weekends as a very small and scared child. I ran the merrygoround at a park for years of summers. I saw the beach-going crowd in their varied forms of undress. I was mostly scared. At that time life scared me. I felt very alone and no-one to talk to and tell my life to. I certainly never realized how interesting the things around me were..... interesting in a visual way.

I am just as scared now, as I think on the times today. I always want to ask what is wrong with me. I don't fit anywhere, but I write instead and do vids to find the answer.... to handle my fear.

Marsh is working a different joint in a different town a few years earlier than my stint at amusement places. Not the early fifties that I spent on the beach, but a generation later.

Marsh holds for me a piece of the American puzzle. He is close to a reality that is American and deep, as his people experienced the thirties and survived those times. So I could experience and survive the fifties at Nantasket Beach and the nineties in Dover and Revere. This last locale housed a grand amusement establishment many of my friends recount endlessly.

Marsh is but an artistic forbear. Someone I love very dearly, for making my world so rich and beautiful, with his woman on the merrygoround horse, his scenes of railroads inspired by Burchfield and Hopper. His homeless men, his breathtaking drawings of near-nude women and men. Both Burchfield and Hopper along with Marsh have allowed me to live better here in America for knowing their work. I think what I admire most about all three is they never copied anyone really when it came time to do their real work. Hopper did remarkable magazine sketches for money he hated, but they are so beautiful to me. Burchfield's huddled Depression houses are peerless and Marsh's accumulated sketches for his own and my amusement bring me to tears, render me helpless as I sit on the couch and try to figure out how so much genius can be located in but one human.

Marsh's contribution to me in the late nineties runs as follows. I wish to unburden myself here. Every important thing that happens to me seems to be magical. I inhabit a murky world or so it seems to me. I like his human figures, as I say but there is more.

He is a master of print, of letters, as in the alphabet. Especially advertising print. What may be called signage, of all varieties. I love signs and advertisements for their physical beauty, as well as for their duplicity, their promise of one thing or another. The signs guarantee us eternal bliss, youth, and the ability to see the void clearly, the space between the earth and our deep dreams, our imagination. Print messages may appear on the tv and the billboard, the newspaper and the commercial product. The use of public print reached some high level in the thirties.

Now in the later ninteties bits of the alphabet selling something are still very much part of our psychic landscape. It seems sensible to want to explore that world. Worlds of print and letters to think about and question. I shall look at one of Marsh's large pictures below. The overall impression one gets of the painting is that its theme is blatantly obvious, trite and on the surface. Yet parts of the painting are special and even breathtaking. One just has to be selective and draw attention to sections of the picture.

His eye painting, the one with the big eye and the print about eye exams is absolutely stunning. He teaches us a whole lot about how to see in industrial mass society, the one we were entering in his day. How did, how would, how could, the individual manage to survive the poverty and the loneliness? Signs stated the facts, if only folks would see them, the facts that would pull them out of the horrid Depression where people had so little.

The painting says that to see is vital, and within one's grasp. Reason and not one's own personal depression must rule. Get your eyes examined and get on with life. Stop going around grousing and complaining. Do what is necessary to feed people in the family, to keep the lights on in the deep nights of winter. See what you gutta do and just do it.

You see.... with Marsh. He forces you to. Even though the painting in its composite form is rather overdone and silly. Some sections of the painting don't really seem to fit and that is confusing. The unifying force in the work is the print mesages. The print had the answers. Print is not some background filler. It is central to getting Marsh's message on the issues of the times. In the print is salvation, but one must see it first in order to be able to act and survive the Depression. The presence of the alphabet, nay its centrality, is a semi-cryptic thing that will help us overcome the daily troubles. The leaky faucets, the holes in the pocket, the difficulties of bringing enough pennies in to run the household and feed the kids, put some kind of garments on the shoulders of the family so they can go to church on Sunday and not feel ashamed.

As an aside, I don't think Marsh ever got over his own personal depression. It is what drove him slavishly to sketch, catalogue, write in his notebooks, travel about the city, to the exclusion of everything else. He kept exhaustive notes on where he went daily, how much he spent, the weather that day, the medium he used on this or that picture. Notebook after notebook to document his every move. All this activity kept him from dealing with the big facts of life and death and then he goes and dies on us prematurely at something like age 55. What a loss! His later art is surreal and more spooky than what came before. He is such a terrific drawer, sketcher and that. He had to occupy every moment as he ran about New York getting visual pictures down and then going to his home to record where he had been, and and where he would go tomorrow. Some kind of force drove him to move all the time so he would not have to think on the hard things of life. He is the quintessential driven artist. With so much talent at drawing the human form, especially the female form, that one is left agape. This talent must have been a burden on poor Marsh. Certainly his deeply felt drawings by themselves, seemed to him to have little commercial value to them. They just happened on him and he was kind enough to make the sketches and leave them for us. They alone would never make him much money or fame. His best stuff is always personal and deep. Not the thing that will bring in a dollar. He was rich financially, so money was not the issue. Fame was, and so he gave us these large paintings like the eye picture where he stuck everything in but the kitchen sink. As if he is saying to the public, take everything all at once and give me a million bucks for the painting, so I can get back to my real work which is the little sketch-study of a female or a male in a pose in a dance hall or a burlesk or a street.

During the Depression the poverty distorted everything and made poor people slaves, who had to toil just to get by. It was a horrible time to be so poor. The signs were statements of fact and Marsh got them down on paper, so we could see and appreciate their reality and value.

Print was evidence, testimony, on what was going on. Give him a lot of credit for that. He was seeing, just like his signs said to. He was seeing and then, most of all, he could convey what he saw to the generations to follow, mine and yours.

He came, he saw, he saved. And in the process left us with some stunning material. The painting of the eye, as a whole, is confused to me. Watered down. Weak. But if I crop or separate sections of the painting, as I would with a photo or with an advertisement I cut from a magazine, something wonderful emerges. It is in pieces of work, chunks of painting, that I can best appreciate the thinking of this most thoughtful artist. One who is a cherished part of my American tradition.

As is my wont I seem to need to connect the books I read and the art I observe with my life. As it is that one's life and art always merge. The daily life is informed by art, tradition, poems and paintings. It is what makes life on an everyday scale so interesting.

Here is what is going on in Bob's parking lot. I hang there and try to locate my reading and research in some human setting which I happen to occupy at the time. Bob's parking lot is where I spend some of my time. And what do I see in my place? Oh, the usual seagulls and pigeons cleaning the yard by pecking at the McDonald's bags of detritus, the stray Butterfingers candy wrapper, the Taco Bell mini-packets of this sauce or that. There is a hot sauce packet and a mild sauce pouch. The birds have a way of opening same and eating the rich contents Such contentment and persistence, as the little Hoovers scoff up the junk of our mass society in the nineties with such seriousness and completeness.

I don't know, but it just gives me such a full feeling that, as I think on Reginald Marsh, I am so favored by the sight of these marvelous two-wings in Revere, doing their job to keep everything cleaned up for God and country. For the city of Revere and its civic pride.

The other day I went over to Dunkin' Donuts at seven, and found Jerry Sherman who sells tools to Bob of Bob's Discount fame and renown. The donut joint adjoins Bob's parking lot and is the source of many spent cups, straw wrappers and the tissue that is used to stick around the donut. What happens is the drive-in customers stop at the edge of Bob's parking lot, lower the window and throw unedible items to the ground so they won't have to discard them later. Nothing like efficiency, I say. I stand there on my broom, watch this time and again. They look at me. I look at them. We don't really see one the other. They roll up the window and go on to their job or what-all.

Jerry has had major heart surgery, but now is well enough to continue playing tennis. His dad has the name, Moe, or better, Moses Sherman, and he, along with his son Jerry, my friend Jerry, lived and played in the New York of Marsh's day. Like I said, I went up and sat with Jerry. I heard story on story of Sherman family lore, tragedy and comedy, while fifteen minutes earlier, I had sat in my car and strained my eyes to write in the dark early morning of a Revere sunrise. I was doing this very Marsh piece. I never went much to the donut place, even though I had seen Jerry go over there before.

Just this day I did. Sat at the table while he had his bagel and light cream cheese. I just knew that was what I had to do. I feel very funny puncturing some one person's morning routine as I did, but when I am on a reporting mission, nothing holds me back. I might feel embarrassed, but I listened fully, feeling my way a bit closer to the New York of Marsh's paintings and sketches. Jerry told me about how his bon vivant father lived during those times, how he made money and made sure he spread it around with some mighty fine living. Moe was quite the guy, a swell. A good dresser, smart, thoughtful, enjoyed life an aweful lot. Died young, probably with a smile on his face.

Son Jerry is in his seventies. Gets up at four to drive to Syracuse even now. Mentioned some other obscure New York towns upstate. Can't remember them now. Thinks a lot about his dad and the Manhattan of the thirties. It was given me to hear these stories, as I got ready to start my day in Revere. The luck of the draw so to speak.

The task at hand is to join the century's two parts, the first and last fifty year period. Jerry Sherman is a key, as is Reg Marsh and all the stuff that is happening today to the parking lot I inhabit and the ads I see in the mags and on the tv. All together, I will create my very own image of the world, my own art, using all the things at my disposal. Whatever happens is useful to tell my story and put it on tape to show to myself and perhaps a few others.

How in the nineties would we survive the alcohol and the drugs all over the place? How do individuals survive dangerous and hostile societies, like the ones we have had since the thirties? I worry such issues to death. I am so concerned we live the better life and fear we have not managed it yet. The ones around me, how come they don't see and record the things I do?

The affluence is what diverts us from truly, good lives. What we lived through in the Reagan-eighties, the drug times, the excess alcohol ones, the overindulgence in food, the boom and the bust. The question is how do you live in a godless, aimless, vibrant society that churns us all into dust? One that has no respect for feeling and cares only for show and profit. A cold society, one that sees with the eye in the Marsh painting, and counts what everything is worth. This very society that does not ever reward the artist, but labels him and her nuts and throws them on the junk heap. Various writers and painters have shown America to be a vast nightmare and it may have that quality, if one looks at it a particular way.

Should we see this place as Kafka did, or as is pictured in Mr. Marsh's composite nightmare paintings, or as Henry Miller did in his "Airconditioned Nightmare" book?

Well, I can't do it, because I only see what I want to see and that is a view of this place as benighted and nice.

My people, the ones I see, I only see as nice, as they knife and screw me and ignore and hate and ridicule me. I really don't have much ego to me and believe, to my wife's constant dismay, that all people are my friends and American society is the best thing since they invented sliced bread. What I think is America is so special, as to merit a good conduct medal and an award of some kind. I constantly explore what it is, that makes us so singular the world over. This baby-nation only a few hundred years old, which is a leader in creating chaos, confusion, art. Home to artistic millionaires often with the pockets of paupers, home to visionary fools, to brave painters and scribblers, to drug dealers and pimps, to con men and lawyers, to peddlers and all that. What a great place is America and I would not have missed it for the world! All I had to do was see it and the eye in Marsh's painting gave me that sight. See. I came and I saw. I conquered.

Get clear of what diverts you and see and hear America.

Beneath it all beats a massive heart. The heart may be called the heart of America. The props change in this country but not the reality. Art, true art, can get that reality down. The essential and time-tested art of the eighteen century drawers, as it is mirrored in Marsh. Work done by skilled photographers like Marsh, Stan Chilson, and Walker Evans. David Plowden. We look back and come up with answers for the nineties. The nineteen nineties. As Marsh studied Eakins, the Philadelphia painter of the eighteen nineties to learn skills of reproduction, so I look at Marsh in the nineteen thirties to see how to visualize the nineteen-nineties and beyond. The heart of our country beats with an image of human body and one of print.

Meaning is ever in the signs on the street, over business establishments and marquees, and now in the pictures that flash in the vid and the movie and the tv commercial. This signage is in all the nooks and the crannies of our culture. It is there to our benefit.

There, in signs, lies an answer to life. It can inform us now as Marsh's signage of the thirties does. The society today is falling apart, just as it was in the thirties, only now it is excess and not paucity that is killling us. But beneath, it is the same heartbeat that sounds. The look and the feel and sound of America. Our language on parade and on display. I can recognize the place because I live here. I am breathless at the beauty of the signs and ads. I was born in the late thirties, so I don't know Marsh's New York, but I believe my father was there around that time and he was quite the dandy, like Jerry Sherman's father and he lived hard like so many did in those times. So at least minimally, I can relate to the Marsh world and feel deep feelings, when I try to understand and appreciate this artistic person I so admire and enjoy. I can't paint or don't want to paint. I just want to have fun. Marsh gives me hours of it.

I need Marsh to locate the American beat that pattered out a message then, as I need the tv and the magazine today, to locate the heartbeat of my current America. The essential America, land of the brave and the sexy, lies beneath the surface. It takes Reg Marsh to sketch and photograph it. He manages this. To his everlasting credit.

A sidebar on excess. I said that poverty and excess characterize our society as we went up the line from the thirties to the eighties and the blessed nineties. The parking lot at Bob's will now inform us anew on what excess is about. I just need to wait and I get taught about the world. Dear Seferi, the Greek master, said to me once in a poem, that I should first wait and wait and wait and then I would be given. In this case in the story I will now recount, it was hard to be patient. Waiting, being able to wait, is not one of my virtues. The old fellow I hung with who passed on a few years ago, a friend from Dover, told me this over and over. I just can't wait to hurl myself at the day to extract as much as possible so I can stick it into my work, my vids and my writings.

I saw a six or seven hundred pound man yesterday in Revere. He did not get out of his convertible Caddie, but his three hundred pound friend, Marty, beside me at the flea market, told me about this Tony, from the North End. I saw him late into the day as Marty, who was there selling stuff with me at the side of the road, told me I would. I was convinced Marty was putting me on, until I heard him play Patrick's accordion. He played flawlessly and I figured the guy, Marty, was for real. Real, real.

Patrick told us to call him Patrick back a few years. He used to be Tommy, but for some reason changed his stage name. His stage is the side of the dear street in front of Bob's, a street that used to be Messenger Street, and is now officially Ferragamo Way.

Patrick plays a screwed-up accordion alongside us and bangs his foot on the suitcase he is sitting on. On each leg he has on a tamborine tied with clothesline and the whole racket is unraveling me. It drove me crazy yesterday. He has a right to be there, so who am I to complain? The first precept of the religion they call the Tao, the one from China, is gentleness. I go around mumbling to me to be gentle but dear god it isn't working. I just hate to listen to him work the band as he says.

Anyways Marty who told me he lived in Russia once and graduated from Boston College, said he had a seven hundred pound friend and, by God, he did. Isn't it amazing what one sees here in the land of the holies and the land of excess?

Marsh asks, what can save our society in the thirties and clearly answers. Sexuality and fun, beaches and merrrygorounds. Excess and ecstasy. Weirdness. Strange people who are exstatics and excessives in a time of want.

Bums on the Bowery who have such dignity in their poverty. It can't be money and Wall Street that makes our country throb with a distinct heartbeat, so it must be that the life force beats under the rags, the signs, the taxi dance hall music. It must be the folks having innocent, near-naked fun at the beach who are living fully.

The life force in Marsh's work comes out to play and amuse us. This power is on display in his sketches and in select pieces of his large composite paintings. His contribution is awesome. It really is profound, what he does. He sees deep into the American soul. Records it for the ages, for me and the ones to follow who may see and marvel.

We, in the tense nineties, answer the question what can save us, with the very same answer Marsh provided; sexuality. With him the sex becomes more complicated and convoluted than it need be. Murky, seedy and the like, in his larger paintings. But kindly look at his photos and sketches and etchings and you see what is so profoundly precious about our nineties that was also the case in the world Marsh explored.

Then as now, we can and do have innocent fun, carefree leisure, family outings etc. We are being sexy on the beach or on the street and it is not smutty. It is a clean sexual look . The sex that leaves us with a dreamy look on our faces. We get to thinking on the sex we had in the bedroom a few nights back. The kind that produces children who will also have the same wonderful lives we do in America. Daily and persistent is the sexual sense especially seen in the female form. Today and then too. In some of Marsh's work he catches this. The daily human, usually a woman, who is sexy and sharp and unselfconscious. Not portrayed in a demeaning setting like the smoky burlesk or the roiling beach, but plain, just standing there looking beautiful against a lampost or on a carnival horse or just there with no background at all.

The healthy and kind variety of play and leisure that ties humans and makes them care for one the other. Like the women on the beach with their arms around one another's shoulders or the men doing the acrobatics. In Marsh sketches and photos. There, is the essential and gloriously didactic Marsh. There are his accurate visions of humans at rest, and at play. He illustrates how we lived through seeming hard times by emphasizing the positive and minimizing the negative. The African-American woman strolling down the street in a carefree manner, the people on the merrygoround, the throngs in his photos, shoulder to shoulder, smoldering at the beach on a hot and sweaty day.

For some reasons Marsh covers up the innocent countrymen and women as he moves to create his mass paintings. He takes individual pieces of his art, the photos and the sketches and sticks them into large compositions. He makes the human subjects into ghouls, gargoyles, sirens and mad folk. Their sexual expressions become tortured and distorted.

But I clean it all up, as I am one to sanitize what I see, and insist I see only the good things, avoiding the junk in Marsh's unconscious. He drank alcohol to excess and saw a psychoanalyst. Had much more money than he needed, which all, he had inheritied. Had a few wives, was prone to getting fat; existed, he said it himself, only when he was the center of attraction, as he sketched and showed off, at the beach or at a party.

Not a very nice person in some ways. Clouded and shrouded our essential American person in his photos and sketches, for personal and idiosyncratic reasons. He balked at letting the innocent come out and play by sticking them in the big paintings he was most famous for.

Men there leer at the naked woman in the burlesk line. Lines of bums wait for food. Lonely women wait for a bus or for something at the lonely street corner. Such a lot of despair. Unecessary despair. Gratuitous. Like in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Why can't Marsh just do the happy stuff he is so good at? The pairs of people at play at the beach or the lovely woman walking down the street or the woman on the merrygoround horse and leave it at that.

I don't know, except he was going with the fashion, to praise despair, as the artists of the thirties did or he was just enacting a personal nightmare, that I want no part of.

Marsh sketched well and sort of painted also. He never found a medium to paint in that really satisfied him. His paintings are therefore washed out, murky, to me and not very good. With some few exceptions, like when some light and color dare creep in. For example, the red of a bumper car in which two ghoul-like figures sit. I like his color, red in that picture, while the rest of the painting repels me.

He sketched so well and that is where his contribution informs us today. Ya know nothing stays the same, as today we have to understand the new media to be able to locate the drift and location of the American spirit. We are in a new time today where we have the computer and tv and movie to look at, as we make another foray into the way a nation, America, ticks and tocks.

We have to see the things we produce, our own art, in a new light. The thing we call virtual reality on a large screen or the tv is here. It is another take on reality. It is a force of considerable power over the indivdual. It can sell product, such as Coca Cola, Nike or the NFL. Recall when advertising began in earnest on the radio in the twenties and the thirties. What a splash it made. When they began to peddle Pepsodent on the Amos and Andy show back then. It sold a lot of tooth paste.

What sold was words, the language made into product that could turn a buck. The word, Pepsodent, became an item. Luckies, Wonder bread, Westinghouse, Hoover; like that. America the beautiful, meant and means, America the alphabet. The one we use to get us to buy things that will make us happy, sexy, immortal and important.

Here I will fashion a tie, a knot that binds Marsh's day with ours. The new media don't mean a damn if we don't see that what they really do, is nothing but continue to sing a song of America, the alphabet. This journey of letters is all that is going on, as we plumb a little deeper into our charming American souls. I am not overly impressed with virtual reality.

The everlasting, everloving profound and very beautiful print parade, the journey over our language is the moving force to me. The public relations and advertising industry were getting strong then in the thirties and were able to take a nearly defunct Pepsodent firm, tie it to a radio show and make it a wealthy company, selling tooth paste that would bring sexual, sensual success to the user of same.

The journey to the unconscious today, the deep American mind, has a new vehicle, what is called the virtual reality. As a tool, it allows us to experiment and seek some answers to the meaning of life. Marsh did it with his sketches and composite paintings, and we do it with the gyrations of Hollywood that play at our local cinemas and over the tv at home. Big screens with wrap-around sound. Scenes in VietNam that are to scare the hell out of you, as in "Forrest Gump," the movie. Big buildings that just blow up. "Independence Day."

Marsh gets at the escape dreams of the thirties, the burlesk, the sex at the beach. We use the advertising and the vids of porn and violence, the now thing of virtual reality and big screen and big sound, to form our escape dreams. The result is the same. It lets us travel in the imagination. We, like the thirties ancestors, get off on our prurient and/or sensational clouds the same. We need fantasy. Burlesk is found today in the dirty vid, the glossy Playboy mag, in the local karaoke bar, etc. Beach carnivals have been replaced by condominiums in Revere where I hang out. The honky tonk is gone from there. They just moved it to Foxwoods, Disney lands and Atlantic City. Our palaces of play exist elsewhere.

We have sanitized theme parks by Disney. The airliners which I see daily since Revere is so close to the airport at Logan, take you there. They are a whole industry. We have the gambling palaces on the beach at Atlantic City, the twenty-four hour a day glitz and lighting. Floor shows and alcohol, gambling and massive food buffets. In Revere there is the Squire, a fancy place, where they have floor shows with pretty women. Associates I hang around with, tell me about this and that one who are especially adept at one gyration or another they describe and illustrate to me as we stand there chattering on in front of Bob's.

You no longer have to be at the burlesk or beach to get your own massive thrill. Virtual reality, realistic vids and tv, allows one to travel to a spot while sitting in on the couch. That is new, but the product is the same. The result the same as always. Excitement, sex and thrills. Guns, violence, gymnastics, breasts and phalluses. Some mental stimulation, is all.

It becomes quickly apparent that nothing at all has really changed. Cheap thrills and neon letters together. We are accompanied on our trip through the forest, America, by print. What you have is the human form accompanied by our alphabet. The both of them tell us where we are, what to buy, and who is who, as the figures... they gyrate and turn and sell.

Stop the moving image on the tv with your most versatile clicker, if your clicker has that capacity, and you see we are being most graciously accompanied over familiar American terrain by print, by the alphabet. Behind and beside the two-legged figure, you will see it. The presence of print. The language of choice, the American sign, the advertisement, as witness and guidepost to the unfolding saga of our nation. We are never lonely as we gambol, then prance, or sexy-pose, across the screen. The print accompanies the woman who sashays to our delight. She's peddlin' Clairol or is it perhaps, Xerox? It doesn't matter.

The idea is of print as witness. It is to be found in the latest virtual reality thriller, the sega genesis game. You see the print tell us of this product and that, on the tv. It quietly accompanies us, our guide, as we watch an NFL game, or our favored sitcom. The glorious woman called Gloria, Maryanne, the Clairol woman, the women on "Friends." Behind and around are letters, our very own American letters.

And it is no different from the work of Marsh in the thirties. His trall in the light of signs and ads. Letters accompany the figures and they walk and they talk.

The signs guide and direct us. We join them, as they, the printed letters, signify, gesture, and laugh with us. They have a life of their own. Nothing seems as powerful and strong as language on display, to tell us something, or to get us to buy something that will make us more beautiful and immortal.

Sometimes the messages are duplicitous, but life is too, so one must get used to mixed messages and learn to live in ambiguity. I have, and it allows me to appreciate the world of then, in Marsh, and the world of now, in Disney and in Speilberg.

Today as yesterday. Today is yesterday. Now is forever. Always was. Is.

We take the greatest language the world has ever known, the one used by a lot of the people worldwide, and so use the American alphabet, to document the times. The thing has a massive importance, does the signage on the street, and on the tv, or in the movie. To boot, it sounds pretty and that is no small thing.

And Marsh knows it in such a deep way. Signage is in the so-called ashcan painters who preceded and then surrounded him, but not as central as in Reg. After all, Marsh studied with the great John Sloan. But he tarried for a short while only, with the ashcan group of painters. His vision was too idiosyncratic and bizarre, really, to fit any place neat and easy.

None of the painters I know, spends as much time as he does on signage. Why does Marsh do that thing? One reason is central. 'Cause he's good at it. He likes to expend physical motion on a thing. It occupies the time and he is a compulsive worker. It keeps the hands busy and the brain occuppied.

There is another reason too. 'Cause language is very important for us, as a distinct people. As an American people. Both things operate here. He likes to draw the curliques, the shapes of letters, and gets a kick out of the joining of letters to form the words. There are all sorts of types of print. There is size of letter, the framing in a sign or picture window. He gets off, gets a visceral pleasure from drawing letters in combination. In addition he feels we can learn something of value about American culture, for our signage operates as a teacher, like the Bible acts as a teacher, if we will only look.

Marsh is first a teacher and then an artist. He teaches the whole damn culture we are privileged to live in, but we never listen to our real teachers, because we never recognize them. Ever. They die anonymous. Or nearly so. Marsh did. I never heard of him, until one day.

I was pulling random books off the art section of the Regis College library. I like best the big and fat books located in what they call in a library, the folio books. Alone on the third floor of the building, I took Goodrich's massive volume of Marsh and sat in a quiet and sunny section of the library, at a corner alcove desk. I leafed throught the pages, almost got sick from the distorted figures Marsh had in his paintings, and quickly put the book back. A bad dream is how I saw it.

At a later date I looked at his photos and his small drawings and fell in love with Marsh's work. It took on tremendous meaning to me, as I sought to understand the thirties and how we got through that time. I looked at Stan Chilson's views of the American village and at the same time, used Marsh to explain the big towns like New York City.

I have only found one person who has heard of Marsh, Larry. He is a head librarian at Wellesley Free Library where I go a lot.

Marsh is not famous like Hopper is, with his paintings about alienation. Not famous like Walker Evans who shot pictures of the poor. Just not famous to a lot of folks. He is, to his childhood pal, Lloyd Goodrich. He probably is to experts who study and teach art. I don't know anyone like that, so I can't say. He may be justly famous and known, but not to the average intelligent layperson, or so it seems to me

He is to me, largely because I reduced his work to fit my needs and thus found his greatness. The ones who write about him assert he is a master of Renaisance and Baroque art. He copies everywhere he goes in the museums of Europe, to get the feel of the human form. Then he comes to home to put another suit of clothing around the shapes of the Renaissance. He is just drawing the times he is living through with some mighty old and powerful tools. He does it better than any one I know, is all. He draws people amid a background of things and signs. Buildings, lamposts, theatre marquees, burlesk theatres, beachfront establishments like custard or hotdog stands.

Signage appears in his photos of men standing around in the Bowery, as we see men standing idle aside print that is also standing idle. These photos to me are as beautiful as any I have ever seen. They remind me of Atget in Paris who, to me, is the very best.

As we are blessed with infinite time on this fair earth, it seems pleasant now to me to spend a few minutes looking at one of Marsh's composite paintings for some kind of quaint analysis.

Look at " Paramount Theater," a composite painting, and you see "Claud," in print, over the woman on right. We have for our pleasure a painting and its related photo which is in a way the premeditation of the painting. What does this work mean? Who can say? We read the beginning of the actress's name, Claudia. Why just "Claud?"

I could riff on that a while, but why don't you? I don't feel like it. Maybe "Claud" only means "Claud," It could mean only five letters; maybe it is a kind of cryptic message whose nature does not interest me. Maybe he is in love with letters and they don't have any meaning, just "Claud as Claud," some five or so lovely letters. Come to life under his pencil and he likes the way they look together.

"Paramount", the painting, shows the ad of a woman's face behind the figure on the left and to the right some print behind the second figure. He argues, it seems to me, that people in his day bought dreams of who they were, in movie fantasy. His painting promises release from a boring life, if you just buy a ticket.

The lovely actress is in picture form, above and behind the first woman, and her name in letter form, above the second. Print and picture both talk to the people of his day and to us as we view his painting and photograph. The print is part of a statement of what people of the time sought as a relief from their, daily and hard, Depression life.

Marsh seems to understand, as so many artists did in his day, that the human would use mirrors, dreams, and fantasy to survive the hard times. They would escape into the dream world of imagination and go to the movies with Frank Capra, King Vidor, and dare to have fun. Marsh uses the picture of a screen beauty and some print to tell us about the way fantasy could draw average people into darkened theatres where they could forget their lives for a bit.

Print is easy. Print is print. It is direct, pretty, unambiguous on occasion.

Marsh gets into it. He is good at reproducing it. The people are a bit more complicated. Who are these women to Reg? In "Paramount." He hokes them up. He takes the neutral look of the photo and changes it to something more negative or controversial.

Puts on a bored look or a blank stare. He paints them in such a way as to suggest they are cool and bored and alienated, all at the same time. That is the fashion that inspires Hopper. Everyone in the new society is alienated. After all, these artists live in a screwed up society that can't even feed itself. It is a nasty society where the mass starve and the rich play and live high. Recall Thorstein Veblen and the things he said about the rich. He coined the words, "conspicuous consumption" to describe the public excesses and status crimes of the wealthy classes.

The poor were dupes for false advertising. The rich cared only for high living and status. Artists, writers, photographers, social scientists all mined this line of thinking. The new urban environment would become a locus for a whole new way to be lied to and deceived.

Marsh paints for the audience of his day and says to us, we are the first generation to do sex for money in a mass way, the burlesk and the movie. Sex where some promoter makes a buck. Most of the time this sex will not include the actual act of sex, but its representation on the stage or the advertisement.

Marsh is witness to a society that will now publicize and extol sexual behaviour at the beach and the carnival. At the dance hall and the burlesk. And he goes on to say , ain't that interesting? We are going one more time down the road to perdition, as only we Americans seem able. The road is called Loneliness Drive, Alienation Place, and that. He sells the accepted version of truth and reality in his mass paintings and I don't find it very interesting or compelling. But give him credit. He at the least saw a major sociological phenomenon and felt he had to comment on it with the paintings he forced out of his tortured psyche.

I just don't like the painting under discussion all that much. The one on the Paramount theatre. I like the photo a lot more. The photo is so ordinary and that is its strength. It may not be art, in that you snap a picture and aren't laboring like you would on "The Paramount" painting which may be profound. I just know there is a genius in the way he shot that little old picture and maybe it took years of looking and drawing to be able to shoot that one great picture. It takes no effort to snap a picture but there is a lot of thought and experience goes into that one act. To me, it is a terrific photograph, much more beautiful than the painting and more true to reality. The photograph is authentic, representative of the time in a way the painting is not. It is no small thing to take a great photograph. It looks easy but it isn't.

Look how a great writer makes it look so easy to say a thing. It is effortless and appears to be nothing great. I like Henry Miller, for example. One of his sentences may not seem like much of a deep thing, but you think about what he says, and it is extremely important. It took years of pain and sacrifice and years of life, for him to make that one profound statement that looks innocent, but is deep. Well, some of Marsh's photos are as profound for me as a line of poetry by Justice, Sevak, or Ritso. All poets. Or a line of prose from Joseph Mitchell, who was writing about the Depression for the New Yorker in the late thirties or early forties. See his book, "Up in the Old Hotel."

A lot of life and experience went into that lone click of the shutter for Marsh. He is a really terrific photographer who captures such wonderful expression in his subjects. And then he mucks it all up by going into his deep mind to create some paintings I don't much like. Who is to say what pathology rules us, but Marsh's demon is of a particularly virulent shape. His paintings seem meant to repel and upset. I wish he could be more nice.

He puts alienation and coolness on the faces in the photographs when he paints them. Only his photos aren't that way. His old woman in the Paramount photo, she is in the middle, is biting her lip or grimacing. The smiling movie star face behind her is in stark contrast to hers. She may have to use the toilet or the rheumatism is acting up.

The woman on the left is just plain worried. Maybe the Depression, but she doesn't look poor. Maybe she is late for something. Or something she ate. Or she just feels lousy or her shoes don't fit right. She does not look to be alienated and angry about the run-a-muck capitalist society she occuppies. In the painting she looks like a bloody madonna, bleeding for the rest of us poor souls.

You would know he would leave out the figure on the far right of the photograph. She looks out of the photograph. I won't comment on how I see her. This essay is getting too long. Only say she too fascinates me and puts me to thought.

Marsh is merely messing around when he paints. He does a take on the photo. The people have on ordinary faces in the photo. Then he paints on their faces, alienation and severe distress. He is just playing tricks. He is selling a vision of the times, how alienation dominates.

The painting, "Paramount," is about people overshadowed by the movie poster in the back. He seems to argue that fantasy is bigger than life and dominates it, but to me in the photo the humans are larger than the background. They come across as real and meaningful and attached to their world in a sensible and sane way. The people are in control in the Paramount photograph. The print behind the woman on the left ,"ffice," does not dwarf the figure. It fits, as does the print to her right, "The Boys From Syracuse."

I really don't believe we fall for the advertising or Hollywood message that much. Not as much as critics of the thirties or those of the nineties would argue. I maintain that as long as we analyze and use reason to look at the print, the ads, the soaps, the sports, the talk show on the tv, the sitcom, the drama, the doctor show, the lawyer show, all will be well.

We say that we are overrun by the commercial, the violence, the sex, the cop chases, the murders, the bombings, that drift across our eyeballs when we watch tv and movie. The ads promise the same things they did then. Only today the form is a little different. Nothing new really. Prudes like Presidential candidate, Dole want to clean things up in Hollywood, but the fact is folks like the sex and violence on the screen. They get off on car crashes and ritual murders.

Marsh hacks out a line that played well then; the idea that alienation dominated mass society. We do the same thing today. Criticize our ads, shows and movies because they only show the dark, nasty side of life and ignore the sunny, breezy pleasant things. The things one may call innocent. We say the visual stimuli just glorify sex, violence, gain, and false dreams.

I suppose that's all true, but there is more which one can say and that is what I do with my work here. Argue the ads and the stories of tv and movie are things of beauty and wonder, if we will but detach sections of them or cast pieces of ads in a light that is separated from their intended message. I would argue that the visuals around us are of beauty as themselves, and not important for what they are trying to sell or get us to think.

Marsh's photos and sketches are a serious appreciation of his day's images. He saw that print was a thing of beauty. Whatever ridiculous claim it made, the print, did not matter. The ads of his day were valuable as a conglomeration of letters and pictures that made some kind of artistic sense and had a charm and value of their own.

We are the now-America of the Budweiser frog, the NFL and the giant gladiators, the talk show abnormalities of Ricki Lake. What else could we ask for to look at the essence of our culture? Our souls are on our funny sleeves. We have Hillary and Mrs. Dole and the glorious humans who sell us dishwashing cleaners, headache things, tires and cars on the tv. We have Disney figures, Batman and thank the lord, Superman. Our visuals are staggering and underneath the messages are forms that are beautiful in themeselves. Not hard to understand. Warhol saw this beautiful essence that is America and is found in our ads and slick stories. He got famous for it.

I would maintain that in our daily culture, our ads, photos of common things, our representational paintings, our postage stamps, women's styles, men's hairdo's, in all our ways of daily life, there is an elegance, a charm, a seriousness, a greatness that our best writers, and our best artists plumb into. Marsh explored his thirties to great advantage. He knew the common because he sketched it and photographed it. It is up to us to take the nineties and avoid easy generalization, but hoe the hard line of understanding the daily life and art.

I like the women in the photo Reg Marsh used to make the painting, "Paramount." Everyday life is used as a model. In the same way the figures and the print behind our ads and stories and dramas today are ordinary, until we gussy them up to sell something. If you take almost any magazine ad and cut it up to show the human or the print free of the intended sell, you see the essence of woman or man or child or old person or odd person or American or Cambodian. You also see profound print as biblical message or as a letter of love to your honey.

I wish Reg had stayed a photographer and a sketcher. He was so good at it.

I will turn to another aspect of the interesting human we call Reginald Marsh. I feel I begin to know him and his ways a little bit. I am sorry to be hard on him and to skirt around a major neurosis in his character makeup, but he asks for it. He makes the intelligent observer at least dare raise the following questions about his motives.

The essential Reg is a voyeur. We must speak the truth. Who loves the female form and is a consumate drawer of the form. His woman on a merry go round horse is just stunning. A real beautific vision to look at. You could tell a hundred stories looking at this etching. Woman as siren. Unable to be resisted. You go to war and kill over her. Her shape can never be resisted. Not as Reg drew her. He loves the public woman. Can he do anything with women in private in his real life? I am just raising the question. I think he prefers to take their measure in public.

Through the little peephole of his camera, with the dexterity of his drawing hand, he captures an essence of woman. I don't know how he performed his sexual rituals in private. He never says much personal about himself. He puts his sexual expressions so fully into his public women, who are in one form of undress or another. A bit of a show off, he draws women awfully well, likes an audience when he draws, needs to be the center of attention. A teacher for years, he attracts an entourage of students over the decades who heed his wisdom and love his work. He must have talked to his students, but said not much in any other public way. This is something the biographers say of him. That he said little about himself and his work in public. So much of it has a sexual connotation, one just wonders on that.

In "Reginald Marsh's New York," by Marilyn Cohen, p.3, we are told he talked little. Indeed he never had to, as his pencils said it all. Said what we needed to know. This terrible time we were surviving.... and he was showing the everlasting sex thing, even, or especially, when it got seedy. It was good to look at. Sex. Sex. Sex. To gawk at or to stare.

His advice to the artist and good advice it is, is to stare a lot. In a statement of his quoted frequently by his biographers, he advises staring, above all, for the artist. To stare. How peculiar.

How Marshian. Who never got enough of the street or public scenes he devoured. The tireless voyeur. Indefatigable. Hopelessly in love with female form in public space. Upper class slummer that he was. He never got enough of the seedy, the tawdry, the lower class style. Dressed like a bum himself, though he went to Yale.

In class drag. Hiding and peeping. He should be ashamed of himself. And he comes home at night with peerless sketches of the club, the beach, taxi dance hall, the bread line, the street corner, the carnival. What a terrific sketcher and photo-maker. An eye one can never fault for its ability to catch the woman's permutations, her dress and her undress, her majesty amid all the seediness. The way man is at her disposal, at her mercy. The helpless and hopeless man is Marsh, at the altar of human pulchritude. His sexy vision, tarnished and tattered, haunts him and he returns day after day, and year after year, to get more. Somehow he will make the perfect picture. He never gets enough. His neurosis drives him and he is centered on the public woman in some form of exposure.

I feel a need to clean up an artist, when he is so great. And for me Marsh is very great. Because some like me, are prudes at heart, we need to give the artist some noble and honorable motivation for the prurient ingredients in the work. Because we don't want to mess with the public image of such a prodigious producer, a genius at drawing. He is sacred like Rubens or Rembrant. Yet he is stuck on a neurotic island. One marvels at his eye and his hand, even as one realizes he is pretty screwed up and fixated on reproducing public women in some compromising stance. The woman undressed is his signature and he explores her lovingly and neurotically. He combines sanity and neurosis to form some memorable works.

Marsh is a significant piece of our national heritage. A very important one. He happens to have a prurient interest. Maybe that is what makes him important. He get off on the human form. His near-naked men and women are very sexy. His draped women are sexual underneath. He takes a frozen custard stand and sexes it up with women. He imposes his deep sexual needs on us innocent Americans in his larger paintings. Yet in his background work, his sketches and photos, he captures our essence as a people in a new land and therin lies his greatest value and contribution. Look at the remarkable photo of the custard stand. Then at his frenetic and confused painting and one is clear that Marsh is significant in that work as photographer, not as painter.

He does the new urban proletariat. The not-so-hot, upper class, the more repressed class, attributes outlandish sexual characteristics to this lower class. Marsh is of this prejudiced upper class.

They do it like animals, these poor, who have no real shame, think the rich. The poorer people lead quick and powerful lives, shortened by excess, while the uppers are careful and eat the right things to live a long time. No different today, one may argue.

He is drawn to their energy. Their willingness to get off in a public fashion. He is of the upper class, slumming. A voyeur of class. One who never gets his fill of the poor and of the majesty of the lives they live. The excess, the fast life and the early death. The short flowering of the woman before she sinks to sloth and old age. Marsh is very much an alienated figure in his society. He fits into no artistic school. He thinks most art around him is trash. He talks mostly to strangers among whom he sketches and photographs. He has few artistic friends to whom he may unburden. He is a lot like Hopper who puts Jo, his wife throught the ringer constantly with his petty needs and refuses to deal with any other humans in his society for long periods. The lone artist, alienated and occuppied. Hopper and Marsh, both. Very little around Marsh seems significant artistically. Not the paintings or the architecture or anything else but what follows.

He says in an interview that he likes best decoration in the shop windows and carnival horses in the merrygoround. He says these two constitute the only really creative art of his day. He despises so-called modern art where you can't tell what a thing is. He does work that fits in no school or fashion in his day. For artistic inspiration he goes to the sixteenth century, not to his contemporary painters much. He also likes the Britons, Hogarth and Rolandson, of an earlier time.

He prefers to portray the poor and the working class. He sees them both in sketch and larger painting in a unique and always interesting way. Not the cricket game, the club, or the polo. Not the nice home or the classy child, not the car, the long, slick beauty. He says only window decoration for the department store and the carnival horse are creative forms.

There are painters in his day who ignore him; the social statement painters, the Marxists. Also the regionalists who do pretty pictures of farmers and towns. These last are idealized fantasies of the good life in the countryside. Nothing one can use to impress the more visceral Marsh with his interest in the seedy and the odd. Marsh argues a thesis that need stress the common, the street scene, the beach, the carnival, or the smoky adult show in the burlesk or dance hall. Further he explores the sexual dimension of the working class life. A controversial subject matter that gets people to look at him askance.

The genius of America is always on the street, in signs, pretty women and in carnival horses. Any different today? Look at an hour of tv and see that there is where our genius has always been; in the commercial, the celebration, the beach and beautiful women. Only then in the thirties you had to go out to find it. To the beach or the street or the movies. Now you can stay home and experience the same thing, sort of.

If one had to choose one place Marsh preferred above all else, it is clear to me that was the beach. Coney Island was called the "empire of the nickel". Playground of a nearly defunct capitalist America. An experiment gone amuck. The poor had to go someplace and it was the beach. It was a mighty engine that roared, was the beach. He says, "The noise of the beach could be heard for miles and there was scarce room on the sand to sit down...." I remember Nantasket beach like that when I peddled newspapers as a little kid. I don't now and didn't then see it as exciting or romantic or interesting. It was hot and crowded on those Sundays and I sold some papers, is all.

What is it about Marsh? He is a peeping Reg. That is glib and easy to say. He likes to look at near-naked men and women together in one place. His life is sketching the human form and here he finds all his needs met. He asks the question in his work, if it is possible for men and women to get together? Well, yes. Because all humans have a pulsing energy that draws one to the other. He shows this energy and illustrates how it works. He can reproduce this energy well when he can see the public body of woman and man in near-undress. The figures blend and join in his sketches and photos.

Continuous performance. Life as stage. The beach as spectacle. The game of chance, the rollercoaster, the freak show. Marsh celebrates oddness and excess. Speed at the carnival, sex at the burlesk for men, hardship on the skid row, public exposure of most everything at the beach.

He argues successfully that life goes on, fueled by the sexual and libidinal engine, even in a Depression. Normal type sex, excessive and odd sex, any kind of sex in the setting of the carnival or burlesk show. As long as it is sex.

A number of thirties' artists saved everything, photographed indiscriminately, saved artifacts, stuffed all sorts of cultural evidence into boxes for later use. Ads, bottlecaps, match covers and the like. Some like Marsh sketches a lot. Others photographed a lot like Walker Evans and Stan Chilson. But in the process these pioneers left us peerless views of an earlier and rather nicer America. Marsh may have wished that his painting be seen as his major art, but his photos and sketches give us a picture of the times I prefer. I locate him with a few of my other heroes who have given me such pleasure as I contemplate American history of the recent past.

It may be that the photos are the best thing of all, for verisimillitude. The kind of truth I require as I look back on our country. Marsh's art, is all of his art. I mean, his art is photograph, sketch and painting. The photos are the eye of his soul peering through. When he does the two women on the beach, arm on shoulder, I am transported bodily to his day at the beach. I feel I know the women. They are relatives of mine I can vividly recall. They are not part of a sexual drama, just people at the beach being friends. Now Marsh can't leave it lie. He grabs them and thrusts them into a mass painting where they appear looking up to the lifeguard, sittin' up there big as God. Ridiculous. Shame on you, Mr. Marsh. I respectfully object.

He has to distort and confuse a simple reality to make it into product that will say who Marsh is to the world. The art that becomes his big painting is the vehicle by which he will attach himself to the art world, and the public world, that will recognize his genius. These confused paintings, overbusy fantasies, leave me totally cold, but I can never get my eyes off his photos, or individual drawings of pieces of the larger composite paintings that will become what he is known for. Nothing wrong with what he did, as it was obviously meaningful for him to want to be known as a great painter of his times.

His women on the beach are pure. They enjoy, one the other. Not in an overtly sexual way; just what women have always been. Pals, buds, faced with the same problems of existence; survival, or how to look nice standing on the beach, less than fully clothed.

He carries them off to his painting and has them looking up to male authority and to phallicity, as they now look at the omnipotent lifeguard. One can say his art is male-centered. Pure propaganda on the ascendant role of men. These innocents are transformed into extras on the male set of life. But he is sly, because even in his painting, the paired women are so self-absorbed that one can say they may be in a male-centric society but don't really care. They are one for the other. These two women say it all, for me. The photo is absolutely lush, stunning, charming, important. It is like I can hear them saying,

"you can borrow us for a big deal, this painting, and then we will go on with our lives as it is lived in the photograph you took of us and we will continue to talk about the stuff that really interests us in our daily life."

Privately they phantasize what a boob and a bore Marsh can be, but they are too polite to make an issue of his wackyness. That is what I imagine, as I look on these women. What I imagine they are saying to one another.

I think I have it finally. He draws live persons or pairs of live persons, and then asks to borrow them for a while to put in some mass fantasy and tells them they can then go back to being who they were. He creates life, he is a breather of life in forms he draws or films. He draws so well and then has to be famous for something, so he does these vast paintings which are famed for their dexterity and color.

Then the individual pieces of the big canvases go back to being just drawn figures, beautiful, not alienated, figures that won't mind waiting until they are used again. He creates fine life and that is the main point. His photos and the drawings are the art for me, before he has to do advertising for how talented he is. He is selling product with the mass things. They are not what is important for me.

In his private views before the big sell he prepares, he leaves people where he finds them. In natural and restful positions. He doesn't paint the backside of the female in the beach scene which is what the photo shows, but turns her over to get the breasts and the crotch. He loves what 'tis seedy, working class. If it isn't that way, he'll make it that way. You can bank on it. He gets off on it. He believes the working class is less inhibited than his own and has to show that. Feels compelled to. To bring a name for himself. But down deep what he knows is the backside of a woman is just as interesting anatomically as the front.

In art everything is interesting as itself. Not the woman as product, but the woman as a pure object, an object that is valuable and beautiful, as is any object, a vase or a flower or a car. He has to politicize woman is all, to get known and fit into the cultural theme of his times.

In this sense he is not part of the solution to understanding the world objectively but part of the problem. It would have been better for art, had he just drawn the beautiful bodies of his time against the real backdrops, innocent and pure as Coney was, a lot of the time. People having fun or working on the rides and the games. He needn't have made such a mess of things like buying a frozen custard, but he did so to get at the craziness of his times and his soul.

He is really a very pure being but maybe his psychoanalysis did some strange things to him, to the detriment of his art. He may be one of the great drawers of all time. He was a quite good photographer and social chronicler of his day. As anyone who worked around him knew. Goodrich did and applauded his fine sense of realism, before he would turn to making the whole thing hoaky and goofy in the big paintings. Maybe what we should do is just see the joke he makes of a whole picture like the eye exam painting. See the big picture as a joke. Then take it apart and take pleasure in the picture's pieces. It is what I do as I marvel at his individual , cropped sections of pictures.

The sexual theme he peddles in his massed, busy picture-paintings does not interest me. If dirty old men want to leer and women are willing to parade with parts exposed, that's ok with me. I could care less what people do with their bodies in public or in private.

Of great importance, however, is what he is. Marsh is a visual poet in his sketches and photos. He understands public print, public language. These print media are the lines of the poet. He tells us where reality is. In the American language on display on the street. It is thirties' grafitti is what it is, and is the soul writ large, of the social class that is low. The language in writing he portrays is beautiful, on display and so powerful to look at. He is a proponent of public transportation. I am punning. The print in a subway scene asks, "why not use the l?" The poetry of the city is further enhanced by his figures in the drawings. There is his art for me. In the holy relationship between print and figure.

We wait a lot, we humans do. Eat, walk, stand there, wait on customers, wonder what's for supper. Marsh gets all this down. At his finest Marsh just catches the human as human, one we can enjoy fifty years later. Sometimes he sexes up the figures in the sketches. That is ok too, although I prefer the photos from which he borrowed these caricatures.

He does some fabulous drawings that could have been done in Italy or France threee hundred years earlier by an equally talented drawing master

The human spirit will live despite what the times will do to it. Human beings lose all the time, most of us. We create false myths to get through the day. We buy products that make absurd claims to us.

We do what they want, as artists, and not what we want. They... are the ones who control the big world and sign the checks. We, as public and artist both, give away our right to be free and beautiful as ourselves. We give it away with not a care.

Marsh's serious work is hidden. He is, after all, a private fellow. He says that. When he does his best work he is having fun for himself. Making himself laugh when he sees his sketches and photos, because they are so beautiful. I mean, isn't that why any of us does what we consider art for? To have fun, to amuse ourselves, to pass the time? That seems to be job one to me and to Marsh too. He tells us to work compulsively like any good artist does.. Just work hard and it will come out all right. Hard work and don't you worry, child. He makes it clear that the real art comes of the heart and not from the head.

He is but a fresh breeze. Marsh. And he fits me into my reality of the time I am alive in. Here's what he says to me and I must go off. It is Thanksgiving Day, 1996, and I hope Sheila and I can get out of the house a little bit and go for a ride. The light is strong and bright today. A little dust of snow on the ground. Pretty.

Tomorrow I will see the parking lot at Bob's. And Blondie. I call her that, but I think it is Marylyn Monroe. We need to celebrate and rejoice. She is in Sozio's window.

Marsh's skill was at counterposing what Goodrich calls "insistent objects" with people. These things really, lamposts, merrygoround horses, subway seats, lifeguard stands and the like have a soul. Like print does. So he locates them into a human environment and person and thing go about dealing with one another. I have always believed and known that things have souls and I suppose that is a reason I like Marsh so. His insistent objects have such life to them.

Like the cardboard figure of Blondie in Bob's parking lot at six in the morning. She seems to say to the joint, "hey Bob." She commands a post at the edge of the parking lot, overseeing a bunch of fifties furniture in Sozio's window. I pass her daily on my way to get the bagels up the street. She always seems to be ecstatic and she says, "hey Bob." I can hear her.