Michael Engelmann’s design here was one of many he produced for the German tobacco company Roth-Händle from 1955, creating a huge demand for its affordable cigarettes incorporating the dark tobacco promoted in the poster as “naturrein” (pure). This was his most famous advertising campaign. Engelmann was self-taught as a graphic designer and worked mainly in Germany but also briefly in New York in 1949, where he was inspired by American advertising practices. In this composition, the disembodied red hand retrieving a single cigarette from the red pack lettered in black with the company’s name, set against a black ground, is characteristic of his reductive approach to color, composition, and motif.