Reginald Marsh, Twenty Cent Movie, 1936

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.