1927

Rhapsody in Blue

American, 1880 - 1940

This is the original artwork for a prize-winning advertisement created for the New York piano manufacturer Steinway & Sons, a client of the Philadelphia advertising firm N.W. Ayer & Son, where Earl Horter was employed as a freelance artist. A pianist himself, Horter intuitively grasped the spirit of George Gershwin's musical composition Rhapsody in Blue, which had premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1924. The composition is a lively appropriation of the 1912 painting Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (now in New York's Museum of Modern Art) by the Futurist artist Gino Severini; Horter replaced motifs in Severini's painting with images appropriate to his own subject.