Blue and Green Music

Around 1920 Georgia 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. 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.