Urban Realism

Reginald Marsh, born in Paris in 1898 was an American painter of the Social Realism movement known most for his depictions of life in New York City during the 1920s and 30s. He studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League of New York, a teacher who admired Marsh’s awkward burlesque sketches and encouraged the artist to follow that line. Ten years before his death in 1954 Marsh wrote, ‘I still show him every picture I paint. I am a Miller student.’ In his younger years Marsh’s work was colored by the Depression and the divisions in social classes evidenced by the economic situation. His figures are more often than not of a type, the artist more interested in crowds than individuals. He was attracted to the burlesque, Bowery hobos, Coney Island, and the women of those milieus. He filled 200 sketchbooks with drawings done on the street, the train and at the beach, sketches that proved the very foundation of his art. While it is true that a Marsh canvas reveals something about ordinary people in street scenes, looking at a stack of his paintings it isn’t too difficult to discern that Marsh saw the American woman as a powerful and sexual figure.

Isabel Bishop was born in Cincinnati in 1902, but had moved to New York by the age of sixteen. She eventually drifted into study at the Art Students League where she studied for four years. Bishop, too had Kenneth Hayes Miller as a teacher, and from him adapted a technique similar to baroque Flemish painting. Her greatest strength was an extraordinary drawing ability. Her mature works depict the inhabitants in and around the Union Square area of downtown Manhattan, where she had a studio from 1934 until 1984. She focused her attention on the down and out men, the working-class women. Most often women, they are shown in workaday interactions, or private moments of straightening a hose or repairing make up. Color is most often muted and subordinate to the effects of light and luminosity.

Because they both studied at The Art Students League, and because they shared an interest in the same subject matter, Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop were lifelong friends. Both urban realists, they are often grouped together as members of the Fourteenth Street School. Their association was strong enough that In 1931 Bishop and Marsh, together with their teacher, Kenneth Hayes Miller traveled to Europe to study the Old Masters. Marsh once said about Bishop’s work, “Her people are what they are no more, no less. But they are very much what they are—they never are what they are not; for her perception cuts to the truth. Her art is at once original and traditional as is that of Thomas Eakins.”

Bowery Beauty (1946) by Reginald Marsh; Chinese ink and gouache on paper

Young Woman (1937) by Isabel Bishop; oil and egg tempura on masonite

Standpipe (1948) by Reginald Marsh; Chinese ink on paper

Tidying Up (1941) by Isabel Bishop; oil on masonite

Manhattan Skyline (1929) by Reginald Marsh; watercolor and pencil

Two Girls (1935) by Isabel Bishop; oil and tempura on composition board

The Faraway

“Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway.’ It is a place I have painted before…even now I must do it again.” — Georgia O’Keeffe, speaking of her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico

Some years back, on a trip to Santa Fe I spent a couple of hours in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. I had previously seen her work in other museums, as well as in art books, so the experience in Santa Fe wasn’t my first exposure, but it definitely was an eye-opener. There was something more compelling about seeing her paintings hung on walls only a few dozen miles from where they were painted, and with the same scenery visible from the museum’s windows. We made a trip to Taos to look around, but missed the chance to visit O’Keeffe’s home there, though landscape often prominent in O’Keeffe paintings was everywhere overpowering.

A few nights ago I watched the 2009 made for television movie, Georgia O’Keeffe with Joan Allen as O’Keeffe and the always excellent Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz. Not a bad picture at all, if a little free with the facts of the artist’s life and relationship with Stieglitz. But anyone will agree that it isn’t easy to telescope a life of ninety-eight years, a relationship of twenty-eight into a compact movie of ninety minutes. For whatever faults it might have, it did receive nine Emmy Award and three Golden Globe nominations. The best of all possible outcomes is that it might spur viewers to pursue the work of O’Keeffe in more detail.

Artist Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the child of dairy farmers. Interested in art from an early age, her road to full time painting was long. It wasn’t until 1918, at the age of thirty-one that she devoted herself to painting full time. Between 1916 and 1918 O’Keeffe lived and worked in Texas, and while there mailed a batch of her drawings—charcoal on white paper—to a friend in New York who showed the drawings to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, at the time one of American’s leading proponents of modern art. Shortly after receiving O’Keeffe’s drawings, Stieglitz included ten of them in a group show at his well-known gallery. O’Keeffe moved to New York in June 1918 at the invitation of Stieglitz, and they were married in 1924. From mid-1918 until the summer of 1929, the two were inseparable, living and working together during winter and spring in Manhattan, spending summer and fall at the Stieglitz family estate in upstate New York.

O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico briefly in 1917 on vacation and from the first moment felt a special affinity for the landscape. She returned there twelve years later for the first of many summers, and after the death of Stieglitz in 1946 she moved there permanently. The stark, but brightly colored hills and cliffs, the black hills of the Navajo country, the cedar trees of the Ghost Ranch area and the bleached desert bones she collected as she roamed the desert were all inspiration and frequent subjects in her work through the 1940s. O’Keeffe was known as a loner and often went off by herself in the car she purchased to explore the land that infatuated her.

She bought a house at Ghost Ranch in 1940 and another in the village of Abiquiu in 1945. After 1949 she lived summer and fall at Ghost Ranch and winter and spring in Abiquiu. The simple architectural forms of these houses as well as their surrounding landscape are both reflected in her work from the 1940s to the early 1960s.

From her years with Stieglitz and her interest (through Stieglitz) in modernist photography O’Keeffe began doing large–scale painting of flowers, leaves, and trees, close-up views of natural forms, paintings imitative of a camera’s close-up lens. The impression is of the eye or lens piercing the depth of the subject. This style is evident in the 1931 painting Horse’s Skull with White Rose and the 1939 work Pineapple Bud. The pineapple painting was a request of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (Dole) wanting two paintings for use in advertising. Though O’Keeffe spent nine weeks in Hawaii painting the local scenery, it was not until later that she painted the requested pineapple, after the company sent a plant to her New York studio.

A young potter named Juan Hamilton turned up at O’Keeffe’s ranch house in 1973 asking for work. In her mid-eighties at the time and growing frail, she hired the young man to do a few odd jobs, but it soon became full time work. Over the years until her death, Hamilton became her closest companion and confidante, as well as business manager. He taught O’Keeffe to work with clay, and with his assistance she produced clay pots and a series of watercolors.

Increasingly frail in her late 90s, O’Keeffe moved to Santa Fe in 1984. She died there in 1986, at the age of ninety-eight. She was cremated, her ashes scattered in the wind at the top of her beloved Cerro Pedernal near Abiquiu.