Blue and Green Music

Although she had not yet visited Europe, Georgia O’Keeffe was exposed to Modernism through exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 in New York and her studies at the University of Virginia and Columbia University Teacher’s College. She was drawn to the theories of the Russian Expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky, who, in his 1912 text Concerning the Spiritual in Art, argued that visual artists should emulate music in order to achieve pure expression free of literary references. Around 1920 O’Keeffe painted a number of oils exploring, as she later recalled, “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.” In Blue and Green Music, O’Keeffe’s colors and forms simultaneously suggest the natural world and evoke the experience of sound.

Credit: Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O'Keeffe