Blue and Green Music

Around 1919 Georgia O'Keeffe was living in New York with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and thinking hard about whether painting could do what music does. She had read the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky, who argued that pictures should reach for the pure feeling of sound, free of any story or object. Blue and Green Music is her answer, carried on into 1921. Hard and soft edges push against one another, a blue that darkens and lifts, a green streaked with white, forms that could be a landscape or could be nothing you can name. She was not illustrating a tune. She wanted the eye to feel a rhythm the way the ear does. She kept the painting for decades before giving it to the Art Institute of Chicago.