George Gershwin looms as one of the most popular, important, and prolific American composers and songwriters of the twentieth century. Kathleen van Bergen, CEO and President of Artis in Naples, Florida, has described Gershwin as a great collaborator for partnering with others to blend musical genres and as someone who broadened the perspective and possibilities of classical music (“Foreword,” in Olivia Mattis, George Gershwin and Modern Art: A Rhapsody in Blue, New York: Scala Arts Publishers, Inc., 2024, p. 6). Apart from being an innovator in music, Gershwin was invested in the visual arts. In addition, he was both a collector and practitioner of art. This essay will not only explore the composer’s contributions to modern music but also his collection of modern art.

Like the artist Wassily Kandinsky, Gershwin saw a fusion between music and the visual arts. He said, “Music is design—melody is line; harmony is color” (quoted in Mattis, p. 18). Both men had a synesthetic vision of the arts, that is, they believed in a “crossing of the senses,” seeing colors when hearing music, or hearing music when seeing colors (Cleveland Clinic). It is well documented that Kandinsky had synesthesia and uncertain whether Gershwin had the condition. But Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros stated he and Gershwin had synesthetic tendencies: “Many times Gershwin and I heard sounds in my paintings and also we saw colors and shapes in his music” (quoted in Mattis, p. 45). He also described the inspiration for his seminal work Rhapsody in Blue in synesthetic terms: “It was on the train with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is often so stimulating to a composer. … I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper--the complete construction of the rhapsody from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston, I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance” (quoted on Wikipedia).  Another point to be made is that Gershwin was a thoroughly modern composer, combining the “high” and the “low” with dexterity. Perhaps this characteristic shaped his taste for avant-garde modern art. 

Born Jacob Gershwine (1898-1937), George Gershwin once said that he had more notes in his head than he could write down in a hundred years and “I write fifteen songs a day. That’s the way I get the bad ones out of my system” (quoted in Gerald Clarke, “Broadway Legends: George Gershwin, The Celebrated Composer’s Manhattan Penthouse, Architectural Digest, Nov. 1995, p. 1). He wrote around 700 songs. It all started in Brooklyn, where Gershwin was born to Moshe Gershovitz and Rosa Bruskin. Early on, Gershwin did not show any interest in music. At age twelve, however, his parents purchased a piano for his brother, Ira, but George began to play. He dropped out of school at fifteen to become a “song plugger,” promoting music to musicians, record labels, and customers in Tin Pan Alley on West 28th Street in New York City. This job improved his pianistic and improvisational skills. Around 1913, Gershwin studied with Charles Hambitzer, who taught him conventional piano technique, introduced him to music of the European classical tradition, and encouraged him to attend orchestral concerts. Soon, the young man developed a reputation as one of the best pianists in New York, serving as a practice pianist for Broadway musicals. In 1916, Gershwin started working for Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls, recording and arranging. He produced dozens, if not hundreds, of rolls under his own and assumed names. He also recorded rolls of his own compositions. His first published song was “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em, When You’ve Got ‘Em You Don’t Want ‘Em,” in 1916 when he was seventeen years old. In addition to recording piano rolls, he briefly played piano for vaudeville shows. His first song to appear on Broadway was “Making of a Girl,” for The Passing Show, written in 1916 with Sigmund Romberg, a Hungarian-born American composer.  In 1919, Gershwin had his first big hit with his song “Swanee.” Al Jolson, a Broadway star and former minstrel singer, picked up the song and it became a huge success, selling over two million copies. Working with the lyricist Buddy De Sylva, the composer created the experimental one-act jazz opera Blue Monday in 1922, set in Harlem. It is regarded by some critics as the precursor to Gershwin’s groundbreaking opera, Porgy and Bess of 1935. 

In 1924, Gershwin composed his first major orchestral work, Rhapsody in Blue. It was commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman for a concert titled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” It premiered on February 12, 1924, in Aeolian Hall in New York City. Whiteman’s jazz band performed the rhapsody, with Gershwin on piano. Whiteman’s arranger, Ferde Grofé orchestrated the work several times, including the 1924 original scoring, the 1926 pit orchestra scoring, and the 1942 symphonic scoring. One of Gershwin’s most recognizable creations, Rhapsody in Blue represents the Jazz Age. Jazz was a distinctively modern and unquestionably American musical form. Its building blocks were rooted in African American culture and musical forms: spirituals, marches, blues, ragtime, and African music. Rhapsody is significant in part because it combines the modern jazz idiom with classical musical conceits. Three years after it was composed, Gershwin said of his work: “Rhapsody in Blue represents what I had been striving for since my earliest composition. I wanted to show that jazz is an idiom not to be limited to a mere song and chorus that consumed three minutes in presentation. The Rhapsody in Blue was a longer work. It required fifteen minutes for the playing. It included more than a dance medium. I succeeded in showing that jazz is not merely a dance, it comprises bigger themes and purposes. It may have the quality of an epic. I wrote it in ten days. It has lived for three years and is healthfully growing” (quoted in Brenda Lynne Leach, Looking and Listening: Conversations Between Modern Art and Music, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, pp. 25-26). 

Rhapsody in Blue and other works by Gershwin inspired visual artists who saw the modernity in the composer’s work. In the 1920s, the American modernist abstract painter Arthur Dove composed three paintings after Gershwin’s music: George Gershwin—I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise (1927), Rhapsody in Blue Part I (1927), and Rhapsody in Blue Part II (1927). Christie’s said of Dove’s Rhapsody in Blue Part I: “Translating one of the most popular musical compositions of the twentieth century into a visual homage, while combining the all-over flatness of abstract painting with three-dimensional assemblage and glints of metal, Arthur Dove’s George Gershwin—“Rhapsody in Blue” paintings stand among the most radically experimental works of an artistic career known for its innovation.” “Created in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, these paintings vividly evoke the vibrant, improvisational spirit of American jazz. … In this way, Dove’s musical paintings transcribe not only the feeling of Gershwin’s songs, but moreover distill into color and line the essence of the dynamism of the American Jazz Age.” Dove listened to recordings of Gershwin’s music over and over while composing these paintings, “creating ticker-tape-like long pieces of paper filled with notations transcribing the musical rhythms” (Christie’s). Dove saw his work not as an abstraction, but as an “illustration” of Gershwin’s piece. Like Gershwin, Dove perceived the profound connection between art and music. 

It is less well known that apart from inspiring works of art, Gershwin was a serious collector and practitioner of art. He was assisted in his acquisitional endeavors by his cousin, Henry Botkin, an artist who made frequent trips to Paris and became Gershwin’s agent there between 1931-33.  
Gershwin also collected modern American art and acquired it from his home in New York City. The composer expressed his appreciation to Botkin for his support of his collecting: “I think you are swell to go to all the trouble that you are going to, in order to start me on my long-wanted collection of pictures” (quoted in Mattis, “Gershwin’s Eye,” p. 19). He also reminded Botkin that he was only interested in acquiring the best works: “Please remember this, for future reference: I would rather pay a little more money for a good work of a master than a little less for a good work of a second rater. I would like to have nothing but the best, even if I do not have many pictures … If you come across a good Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir or any of these first men—even if they are expensive—I would like to hear about them” (quoted in Mattis, p. 22).  

Botkin’s first five acquisitions for Gershwin, in May and June of 1931, were Andre Derain’s Moïse Kisling, Jules Pascin’s Portrait of a Young Man, Maurice Utrillo’s The Suburbs, George Rouault’s Clown, and a painting attributed to Amedeo Modigliani, Bust of a Young Woman. A second buying trip in October of 1931 included works by Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Raymond Billette, Pinchus Krémègne, and Pierre Laprade. In New York, Gershwin purchased Maurice Sterne’s Mother and Child, Bali and, with Botkin, Ben Shahn’s The Beach. Gershwin wanted to own a Picasso, and on Botkin’s next buying trip in Paris in March 1932, his cousin sent the composer a cable on April 30: “FOUND LARGE RARE PICASSO WOMAN ABSINTH [sic] DRINKER 1902 IMPORTANT COLLECTION YOUR ROUAULT SIZE BLUE WITH RED SIMILAR PLATE FOUR RAYNAL PICASSO BOOK FIVETHOUSAND DOLLAR PICTURE PRICE AROUND EIGHTEENHUNDRED UNUSUAL BARGAIN” (quoted in Mattis, p. 23). Exhibited in 1901 at Galerie Ambrose Vollard, the Picasso was the crown jewel of Gershwin’s collection. In 1933, Gershwin lent the Picasso to the Museum of Modern Art, where it was shown to an American audience for the first time. It was also the centerpiece of The George Gershwin Collection of Modern Paintings at the Chicago Arts Club which took place November 10-25, 1933. At the exhibition, a strong reaction was produced neither by any nude nor Thomas Hart Benton’s provocative Burlesque, but by Gershwin’s abstract Kandinsky, Line-Spot (1927). The critic Daniel Cotton Rich wrote of the controversial piece: “[Y]ou could put that picture down on your piano and play it” (quoted in Mattis, p. 30). The Kandinsky showed a progression in Gershwin’s collecting; while he first acquired figurative works—landscape, cityscapes, theatrical scenes, portraits, figure studies, and still lifes—he later collected abstract works including Klee, Léger, and Abraham Walkowitz, Klee’s Albumblatt fur einen Musiker (1923) was an almost literal example of abstract art as “painted music.” 

Gershwin also commissioned three important works of modern art: Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture, Portrait of George Gershwin (1929), Henry Botkin’s screen, An American in Paris (c. 1930), and David Alfaro Siquierios large mural-like painting, A Portrait of George Gershwin in a Concert Hall (1936). In addition, the composer collected African sculpture and East Asian ivory carvings. Several commentators have suggested that Rouault was Gershwin’s favorite painter. Botkin wrote: “The work of Rouault was especially close to him and he was constantly enthralled by the life and spirit that animate his work. He wanted his own pictures and music to possess the same breathtaking power and depth ... He once told me when we were discussing the French painter Rouault, ‘I am keen for dissonance; the obvious bores me. The new music and the new art are similar in rhythm, they share a somber power and fine sentiment’” (quoted in Mattis, pp. 26-27). Gershwin exclaimed “Oh, if I only could put Rouault into music!” (quoted in Mattis, p. 27).  

The composer was a serious artist and photographer who often painted when he needed a break from his music. He told Botkin: “What a great advantage painting has over composing! When I finish a canvas it’s there. That’s the end. But a composition ... after writing it, I have to assemble sixty musicians, and make arrangements of the music before I can hear the results of my efforts” (quoted in Mattis, p. 11). He also posed for some of the leading photographers of his day: Cecil Beaton, Grancel Fitz, Nickolas Muray, Edward Steichen, and Carl Von Vechten.  Gershwin was deeply connected to the arts, as Olivia Mattis has written: “George Gershwin collected art, he created art, he supported art institutions, and he commissioned works of art into existence. These activities nourished his musical practice and expanded his creative outlook beyond that of most composers in history. One could dismiss these activities of Gershwin’s as simply part of his attempt to be highbrow, or, as Leonard Bernstein put it, ‘to cross the tracks’--but there’s more to it than that. The artworks in Gershwin’s collection such as Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker, Modigliani’s Portrait of Doctor Devaraigne, Chagall’s Untitled (Old Man with Beard), and Max Weber’s Invocation were not trophies to the composer, mere symbols of his financial success. On the contrary, they were deeply meaningful objects to him with which he spent a great deal of time and from which he drew sustenance and inspiration” (Mattis, p. 45).