Favorite Paintings 33 & 34

Reginald Marsh, Coney Island Scene c1932

One of the things I enjoy about going to art gallerys and museums is the opportunity to look for common elements across the generations. I've featured Reginald Marsh before in this series, and I've been a huge fan of his work for a long time. Partly, this is because he depicts the American scene in the period between the World Wars, which corresponds to the era I started doing research in as a graduate student (and which frankly was the period that most fascinated me and led me to study history in the first place). On a more aesthetic level, I love the vibrancy of his work, the crowded, active scenes of ordinary people converging in mostly urban settings where they represent hearty resistance to the modern context of cold steel and soulless technology. His work represents something of a counter argument to his contemporaries Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steurt Curry, in stating that the American character is not just a remnant of the agrarian ideal (and I know that that is probably an unfairly limited view of those other artists, but not wholly inaccurate either).

Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Love c1630-32

What I hadn't realized prior to my recent trip to Los Angeles was just how much Marsh's work resembled (and, it probably goes without saying, was influenced by) that of the great Renaissance painter Peter Paul Rubens (who I also recently featured in this series), who was working exactly three hundred years earlier. Both the Getty Center and the Norton Simon Museum of Art had multiple Rubens paintings on display, and though I'd seen his work in the past (the above hangs in the Prado in Madrid), I don't think I ever saw so many in such a concentrated period of time. My immediate reaction was to think how much his work reminded me of Reginald Marsh's. Maybe that's a common theme when the latter is studied in art history classes, but I'm largely self-taught in that area and so it came as quite a revelation. Of course, Rubens's paintings could hardly be seen as the same kind of response to modernism that I see in Marsh, but otherwise, there's a real affinity not only in style, but also in their takes on basic human behavior and attitudes. Each is very earthy in ways that suggest a shared perspective on morals that I'd define as non-judgmental without crossing the line into prurience or worse. They are celebratory and fun-- hardly the image many might associate with the stuffiness of so much high art. If art is intended to make life more enjoyable, Rubens and Marsh certainly mastered the practice.