What was the title of Georgia O'Keeffe's 1919 abstract painting based on musical ideas?

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Blue and Green Music is Georgia O'Keeffe’s 1919 abstract painting based on musical ideas.

The work uses sweeping, layered bands of blue and green to suggest movement and rhythm without depicting a recognizable object. O'Keeffe was interested in whether visual art could communicate the emotional effect of music through color, shape, and repetition. This idea became an important part of how critics and viewers interpreted her early abstractions.

O'Keeffe made the painting during a period when she was developing an independent modernist language. Her abstract works from the 1910s and early 1920s helped bring her to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited them in New York.

The title is literal in its reference to music, but the painting is not an illustration of a particular song or instrument. It is also separate from O'Keeffe’s later flower, bone, and New Mexico images, which are often more visibly connected to identifiable subjects.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

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