During the Great Depression, the dancers at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, down-and-out men on the Bowery, burlesque shows and Coney Island crowds provided social realist painter Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) with subject matter for multiple-figure compositions of New York City’s underbelly. Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York, opening today at the New-York Historical Society, is displaying over 40 pieces by the artist, along with a number of artworks by Marsh’s circle, including paintings by Isaac and Raphael Soyer, Walt Kuhn, Edward Laning and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

Co-curated by the Whitney Museum’s Barbara Haskell, half the artworks on display here are loaned from the Whitney. And across town, Hopper Drawing, the Whitney’s summer blockbuster exhibition, is showcasing artworks by the better-known American Scene painter, Edward Hopper. Both Marsh and Hopper were charter members of the Whitney Studio Club in Greenwich Village and, according to Haskell, writing in the exhibition catalog, both realists depicted figures affected by “psychic isolation and disquiet.” But while Hopper’s characters “turn inward,” Marsh’s “urban population rebelled against their potential loneliness and loss of autonomy by engaging in an almost frenzied rejection of decorum.”

In Marsh’s raucous paintings of crowds, the individuals that comprise these busy scenes are very much in their own world. In BMT Fourteenth Street, 1932, a painting set in what is today the Union Square subway station, two girlfriends walk side-by-side, one carrying a stack of books, both young women casting anxious, sidelong glances out of the picture frame. Meanwhile a prim lady in a light green dress calmly walks toward the edge of the canvas, perhaps onto a waiting train, indifferent to the huge crowd. On the subway stairs, figures jostle each other, some rushing down to catch trains, others eager to get above ground. This busy multi-figure arrangement has a precedent in High Renaissance and Baroque art compositions of writhing figures by the likes of Tintoretto and Rubens.

Most of Marsh’s paintings in this show are made with tempera. Mixing egg yolks with pigments, tempera was popular in the Early Renaissance when artists used the fast-drying paint to create opaque, brightly colored images. Marsh, an accomplished draftsman who worked as an illustrator for The New York Daily News and The New Yorker, struggled with oil paint. Using tempera in transparent washes of dulled color, Marsh layered his graphic strokes, a method all his own.

Hudson Bay Fur Company, 1932, painted with thin, sooty colors, features buxom women standing in a store window. Tiny, delicate marks and broad strokes combine to convincingly describe a scene with both indoor and outdoor lighting. Ten Cents a Dance, 1933, another compelling painting, features taxi dancers, or paid dance partners, a monumental blonde beckoning the viewer while her co-workers mill about.

Marsh and his circle were skeptical of modernism’s ability to meaningfully express present-day concerns. A voyeur from a well-to-do family, Marsh meticulously documented the seedy side of New York, filling hundreds of sketchbooks with notes and drawings, carefully transcribing movie posters and store signs to communicate what the artist called “an honest vulgarity” where “reality is exposed and not disguised.”

Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York, on view through September 1, 2013 at New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY, 212-873-3400, www.nyhistory.org

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com