Earl Horter | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Earl Horter (1881-1940)

A significant figure in the development of Modern art in Philadelphia during the interwar period, Horter was both a dedicated collector of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as well as an illustrator and painter himself. Horter’s collection included Picasso’s radical Cubist representation of his dealer, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910 (Art Institute of Chicago) as well as numerous other masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, Raoul Dufy, André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico and by American modernists such as Arthur B. Carles, Charles Sheeler, John Marin, and Thomas Hart Benton. . Horter, had a keen eye for and interest in the developments of Cubism. and focused his collection closely on acquiring works by the two pioneers of the movement.

Born in Germantown Pennsylvania, Horter spent much of his adult life in New York. Largely self-trained as artist, he had a successful career as a commercial illustrator and was a highly skilled draftsman and engraver. When he arrived in New York in 1903 he worked for an advertising agency, where he was a draftsman, and took an etching class. During the first decades of the twentieth-century Horter’s work as fine artist consisted mostly of cityscape sketches of sparsely populated scenes of urban life. These included a collaboration with Jerome Meyers and Joseph Pennell on drawings of New York architecture in Glimpses of New York: An Illustrated Handbook of the City (1911). He also exhibited his advertising illustration in the annual Exhibition of Advertising Arts and in 1914 became Secretary and an exhibition juror for the New York Society of Etchers. In 1916, at the recommendation of Carl Zigrosser, who would later become the first Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, Horter received his first exhibition at the Frederick and Keppel Company Gallery, showing a number of views of New York. Horter also exhibited at the Pan-American Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Print Club, and between 1935 and 1939 at the Corcoran Biennials.

In 1916 Horter left New York to work for N.W. Ayer and Sons in Philadelphia, where he met modernist artists Henry McCarter and Arthur B. Carles and soon became an avid collector of modern art. Horter, Carles, McCarter, the collectors Albert C. Barnes and Samuel S. White III, the conductor Leopold Stokowski, and the architect Paul Philippe Cret, belonged to Philadelphia’s community of modern-art supporters. As an advertising artist, designer, draftsman, and printmaker, Horter earned much of his income from freelance projects, but this did stop him from collecting.

In the late 1930s Horter also became involved in the Philadelphia Art Alliance, which promoted the arts through a number of exhibitions of European Modernist and contemporary American art including African Art and its Modern Derivatives (1936), Contemporary Drawing (1937), and Pop Hart Watercolors (1939). Before Horter died on March 29, 1940, he saw the closing of Alfred Barr’s landmark exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art at Museum of Modern Art, an event that marked the fruition of Horter’s, and other collectors and curators, commitment to the promotion of Cubism in the United States.