Rhapsody in blue

Horter, Earl (1881-1940)

Item type:

drawing

Date of creation:

1927

Height:

54.5 cm  (21 7/16 in.)

Width:

69.9 cm  (27 1/2 in.)

Technique / Medium:

opaque watercolor and graphite on board

Place of creation:

United States

Description

Several abstract images of musical notes, musicians and instruments are present in the scene. From the Philadelphia Museum of Art web site: "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."

Instruments [MIMO Code] (notes)

Keyboard instruments [2230]
Wind instruments [3730]
Stringed instruments [3101]
Banjo [3226]
Saxophone [4346]
Pianoforte [2299]

RIdIM images

Image URLs

image link 1

RIdIM record id

3369