The tranquility evident in Standpipe, the first Marsh to enter this collection, contrasts markedly with the frenzy that pervades his rendering of the Coney Island attraction World in Wax.  If Standpipe conveys a notion of introspection, World in Wax, three times its size and populated by more than two dozen figures, revels in cacophony and distraction or, as one observer described the tenor of another of the artist’s Coney Island paintings, an “almost paradoxically . . . well-ordered confusion.”*

     For Reginald Marsh, Coney Island was a source of constant fascination and endless inspiration.  “I like to go to Coney Island because of the sea, the open air, and the crowds,” he explained, “crowds of people in all directions, in all positions . . . moving like the great compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens.”**  Located on Stillwell Avenue and The Bowery a block north of the Boardwalk, The World in Wax Musee was an enduring, if macabre, Coney Island attraction for over fifty years (Figs. 1 and 2). Presided over by the indefatigable Lillie Santangelo, the venue was comprised of vignettes populated by wax replicas of the famous and infamous, with a distinct predilection for the latter.  A barker—often Santangelo herself—would entice passersby to view its frightfully meticulous re-creations of the most sensational and gruesome murders of the era as well as grisly freaks of nature. Signage at the entrance evolved over time as the museum catered to the events and personalities of the day.

     Marsh captures, in his trademark frieze-like fashion, a passing crowd of Coney Island habitués—pleasure-seekers of all stripes, from parents and youngsters to voluptuous young women and sailors on leave—in various states of curiosity, boredom or distraction, few of whom are heedful of the entreaties of the barker in their midst, a roll of admission tickets slithering down his wrist like a snake.  As in so many of his Coney Island works, the young women take center stage, relegating the males to supporting roles. Marsh incorporates a newspaper into the composition, its headline heightening the incongruity of the scene while serving as a means to precisely date it.***  Art historian Avis Berman offered similar obser-vations about the painting in a 1996 exhibition catalogue essay:

[I]n World in Wax (1944), the headline of a newspaper reports the failed assassination plot against Hitler by several of his officers that year.  This announcement is almost overwhelmed by the jumble of names advertised as embalmed figures in the wax museum, a list that itself predicts the instant and polyglot celebrity culture of today. Promised images of "Jap atrocities" share billboard space with those of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.  The terrible vitality of life, which mingles the living and the dead, the trivial and the monumental, and the unspeakable with the benign, is celebrated by the pictorial vitality of random clutter of signs and banners clamoring for the viewer's attention.****

     World in Wax is a classic example of Marsh’s mastery of the ink-and-wash medium. During the first half of his career, the artist explored a variety of mediums, from oil (which never truly satisfied him) to watercolor and tempera (to which he was more suited).  By the early Forties, he had returned to watercolor, employing it even for large-scale works.  Still restless, he began to experiment with yet another approach: Chinese ink on paper, the ink prepared traditionally by the rubbing of a charcoal stick in water, employing thin washes of watercolor as an adjunct.  Marsh utilized this medium frequently for the balance of his career, using it for full-scale as well as smaller works.  “Without the distraction of color, in these Chinese ink drawings,” observed friend and art critic Lloyd Goodrich, “he attained the greatest graphic freedom in all his work.  In their fullness of form, linear vitality, and plastic inven- tiveness, they were among his most original creations.”*****

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* Musick, James B, “10 Shots 10 Cents by Reginald Marsh,” Bulletin of the City Art Museum of St. Louis 26, no. 2 (1941), pp. 50–51.

**Art Students League News, January 1, 1949, unpaginated.

***The July 20, 1944 New York Post headline was “Attempt to Kill Hitler!”

****Berman, Avis, "Reginald Marsh: Eros and the City," essay in Reginald Marsh's New York (exhibition catalogue, D C Moore Gallery, New York, 1996), pp. 4-7.  For a rundown of the particular atrocities referenced by the signage depicted at the museum entrance see Frank, Robin Jaffee, et al, Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008 (exhibition catalogue, Yale University Press, 2015), p. 124.

*****Goodrich, Lloyd, Reginald Marsh (Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York), p. 163.