Dear Friends,
The New-York Historical Society's new exhibition, Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York, vividly demonstrates the ways in which art and history illuminate one another—how, as we so often say at New-York Historical, art frames history and history frames art. This first major assessment of Marsh's work in thirty years captures New York City in the Thirties as it reflects the larger cultural desire to reaffirm faith in America during a time of economic crisis. The works depict the verve of daily life in the country's most populated city, with subjects most often neither glamorous nor affluent New Yorkers, but those in the middle and lower classes: Bowery bums, burlesque queens, subway riders, and so on. These colorful figures evoke the transience, motion, and vitality of a decade of extremes.

Marsh's work evokes the diversity and variety of the city. His technical accomplishment spans a range of media from drawings to prints to paintings. The exhibition, on view through September, is both broad and deep, presenting an assembly of Marsh's paintings, prints, drawings and photographs, as well as the work of his contemporaries. The exhibition took shape under the superb leadership of our guest curator, Barbara Haskell of the Whitney Museum of American Art, along with the talents of independent curator Sasha Nicholas and our own Henry Luce III Curator of American Art, Kimberly Orcutt.

Marsh's depictions of an array of urban populations offer myriad insights into the life of the modern city. I hope you will visit us soon so that you cam experience this thrilling depiction of life in New York for yourself!