This painting illustrates the “ life around [Reginald] in New York.”(Encyclopedia Britannica). According to Reginald’s early life stories he was very interested in the life that flows around him and he “was fascinated by public behavior and the exciting commotion of New York.”. This painting shows how busy the life was in 1932. Especially during the hard period of the Great depression. This painting takes place in a “massive structure of the El on the Bowery, the area notorious as a skid row.” Reginald uses a lot of seriousness and satire at the same time in his works. In this one, for example, he illustrated a woman that is clearly not supposed to be there by herself, a man on crutches in the middle of an extremely busy and dense crowd, and a lot of smoking men in a place where smoking might end quite …show more content…
If you look past all of the satire and the bright, friendly looking surroundings of this painting, there is a darker and deeper meaning to it. The fact that there is a shop in the middle of this giant crowd. This is year 1939. Great depression was in its peak and no politician knew how to stop it. People tried to criticize everything and anything they could around them Reginald was touched by the great depression. He was criticized in his early years when he just started to take art seriously. Then he was told by his teacher to not give up and just look around the things that others think of him. That is why he decided to combine the satire with the evil. The way people look at a person who observes the painting suggests that they are dying to say or do something bad. Shopkeeper’s facial expression tells us and even deeper, terrible story of that time period. He looks bored. People look bored when they nothing to do. He looks bored because nobody around him has any money to afford a haircut, and definitely not a tattoo. Those signs tell the people around the shop about how good of a service it is. But still, nobody clearly is interested. Businesses die. People steal. This painting is about people trying to survive in the age of metal jungle. Not only it is a giant jungle, but it is also one of its darkest periods. The great