Reginald Marsh

Twenty Cent Movie
1936

Vibrant painting of 1920s movie theater lobby with patrons, colorful posters, and vintage film advertisements.

Both theatrical and cinematic in its conception, the subject of Reginald Marsh’s Twenty Cent Movie was the Lyric Theatre in New York City. The movie marquee images and advertising signs in the background are based on contemporary films, actors, and actresses, with the theater’s double bill of movies joining We Live Again—an adaptation of a tragic novel by Leo Tolstoy—with an upbeat musical comedy called Moonlight and Pretzels (upper left). Here, Marsh’s meticulous replication of the signage suggests a wry commentary on the figures he depicts. The foreground scene resembles a stage set, with “real-life” stars, bit-players, and extras poised for action. The women in the painting wear cheap imitations of the latest Hollywood styles, while the man on the far right adopts the self-assured posture and flamboyant suit worn by the beloved gangsters of 1930s cinema. In an era when the movie star became the nation’s dominant icon, Marsh’s characters reflect the longings and aspirations projected from the cinematic screen. The advertising copy for upcoming attractions—“Human Emotions Stripped Bare” and “Joys of the Flesh”—suggests the possibility of intimate exchange, but Marsh’s characters are too occupied with posing to interact with their environment or each other.

Not on view

Date
1936

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Carbon pencil, ink, and oil on composition board

Dimensions
Overall: 30 × 40in. (76.2 × 101.6 cm)

Accession number
37.43a-b

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase

Rights and reproductions
© Estate of Reginald Marsh/Art Students League, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/1559

Audio

Reginald Marsh, Twenty Cent Movie, 1936

In America Is Hard to See

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Reginald Marsh, Twenty Cent Movie, 1936

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Narrator: Adam Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum.
Adam Weinberg: In October of 1929, the stock market crashed, and with it went the optimism of the 1920s.
Eddie Cantor: Nowadays, when a man walks into a hotel, and requests a room on the 19th floor, the clerk asks him, ‘for sleeping or jumping?’
Adam Weinberg: Movie theaters—like the one in this painting by Reginald Marsh—offered a temporary escape from the hardships of everyday life. In the 1930s, more than half of all Americans went to the movies every week.
This is the Lyric Theater. At the theater’s entrance, colorful posters appeal to popular fantasies—“Stripped Bare,” “Joys of the Flesh.” Glamorous Hollywood film stars hover overhead. On the sidewalk, the artist has captured a representative cast of characters, who are themselves straight out of the movies—the glamorous blonde, the Don Juan with a rakish hat, a gangster-type smoking a cigar, and a pair of working girls.
American artists like Marsh took a new interest in the small dramas of city life.