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Publ. Proceedings of Amer Acad of Arts & Letters
Series II: 5, 1955

     Reginald Marsh, you are the first to receive the Gold Medal for Graphic Art, given by the Institute in the name of The American Academy. The dictionary definitions of the word "Graphic" show this award to be most suitable. The word is said to pertain to painting, to engraving, to drawing, to "the vivid expression of an idea". The Institute and Academy honor themselves by choosing, for this award, an artist whose work fulfills all the meanings of "graphic", relevant to visual art. You are a painter in tempers, in oil, in watercolor; you are a mural painter in tempers and dry fresco; you are an etcher and engraver and a draftsman with Chinese ink and pen, brush and quill. Your sketches are innumerable; your drawings have appeared as cartoons in daily papers, in weekly papers, in monthly papers; as illustrations for more than a dozen books; your etchings and engravings are encountered in collections throughout the country; your large drawings, on the scale of paintings, hang in museums, galleries and houses, as do your paintings.
     I have heard you say that you are not a man of this time, which I take to mean that you disavow this decade's new academic attitude of diconnection with Tradition. You, whose work is so strongly contemporary, show that you connect yourself with the great past thru the large concept of form developed in the sixteenth century to express an attitude toward man as Hero, which unfortunately we, in our century, cannot share. Yet for this you have found use.
     The persons you present in your pictures are little people, in unheroic situations. A shop girl, or perhaps she is a stenographer strolls before highstooped rooming houses; casual groups are seen in shopping street or park; a drunken man lounges; young people dive from a north river pier. They are nobodies-anybodies. Agglamorations of them crowd your Coney Island beach scenes and their very numberlessness testifies to their individual unimportance. But they are modeled in the Grand Manner. The forms in which they are presented are bursting with energy, expressed in the rendering of the turmoil of grotesque persons on the beach, by the drawing in the rippling skirt of the striding girl, in the modeling of the ornate housefront, and even of the design of the drooping bum, leaning on "elevated" post.