Saturday night at the Savoy: Blackness and the urban spectacle in the art of Reginald Marsh (New York City)

This dissertation investigates representations of African Americans in the work of urban realist artist Reginald Marsh from 1928 through 1938, a period when popular conceptions of urban culture were being reshaped by an increasingly perceptible black presence in prominent American cities like New York. Through critical readings, I establish the ways in which Marsh's complex, contradictory representations of blacks acted as substantive cultural and visual markers---manifestations of concerns about the urban presence of African Americans. As Marsh negotiated public perception, popular imagery, and his own experience of observing those who comprised the city of New York he created a pictorial vocabulary engaged with mainstream culture's attempts to determine America's new urban and ethnic landscape. The central focus of this project is its historically specific investigation of how and to what extent "blackness" signified in social science journals, popular sources, and publications by African-American writers during this period. It also reveals how the artist adopted various strategies that functioned within contemporary discourse about blackness. I demonstrate that Marsh's imagery constructs a means for deciphering New York's shifting urban culture through the presentation of public, racialized space. The black figures that appear on the subway, at Coney Island, Harlem or the Bowery in Marsh's paintings correlate to the period's discourses on urban space, social order and ways to negotiate the presence of African Americans in the city. Marsh employed pictorial methods of representing blackness in order to express the vibrant city as a transgressive site, a place that provides the opportunity to subvert established norms, while concurrently acknowledging the boundaries of the country's greater racial order. In addition I argue that Marsh's reputation as an urban realist who was both participant in and observer of the city's working-class amusements granted him the authority to exploit a range of representational techniques, from caricature to old master drawing styles to politically charged visual tropes, to interpret the black urban presence. Aesthetic decisions such as the arrangement of figures and the use of unnaturalistic physical characteristics operate both to distinguish black racial identity and contain its cultural residue.