Description
Book SynopsisExamines the portrayal of race in interwar American art. Focuses on the works of urban realist Reginald Marsh and his contemporaries to show how black figures acted as cultural and visual markers and embodied complex concerns about the presence of African Americans in urban centers.
Trade Review“A scholarly project undertaken with clarity and precision, The Urban Scene is an important and innovative contribution to the literature on American culture and art during the interwar decades.”
—Mary Ann Calo CAA.Reviews
“The Urban Scene skillfully re-creates for readers the social and racial contexts in which Reginald Marsh’s paintings first circulated. The book deftly explores early twentieth-century artistic practice, urban development, consumerism, and racial identity to help readers better understand how white and black audiences made sense of the artist’s canvases of blacks.”
—Martin Berger,University of California, Santa Cruz
“Readers of this finely nuanced interpretation of Reginald Marsh’s African American imagery will gain a clear sense of the artist’s positive—and negative—contributions to American Scene painting’s portrayal of race during the Depression. With close attention to stylistic, critical, and social contexts, Carmenita Higginbotham cogently reveals Marsh’s pictorial balancing act. His integrated portrayals of New York’s subways, beaches, Harlem nightclubs, and Bowery dives intimated a more democratic opening of the urban scene. But they simultaneously offered visual containment to keep blacks in place. Such pictorial strategies, Higginbotham argues, provided a comfortable and negotiable imagery for Marsh’s white upper-middle-class audience.”
—Ellen Wiley Todd,George Mason University
“Carmenita Higginbotham explores how Marsh’s late 1920s and 1930s paintings of mass congestion and congregation—on the subway or the beach, in nightclubs or breadlines—stage the interracial negotiations that were increasingly understood as a key feature of modern urban experience. Vividly contextualizing the works in the visual field of the period, she teases out the meanings of ‘blackness’ they encode, unfolding a variety of power dynamics, libidinal investments, essentializations, and performances on the parts of both the figures in the paintings and their creator. The Urban Scene is a powerful exegesis of the contemporary pleasures, dangers, and potentialities of reading race.”
—Alison Syme,University of Toronto
“A fine addition to our understanding of race (and gender) as elements in the artistic representation of urban America.”
—David M. Sokol Journal of American Culture
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Urban Artist
2 Reading Public Spaces
3 Girl Watching in the City
4 The Art of Slumming
5 Seeing Poverty
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
