Georgia O'Keeffe
Music, Pink and Blue No. 2
1918
Not on view
Date
1918
Classification
Paintings
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
Overall: 35 × 29 15/16in. (88.9 × 76 cm)
Accession number
91.90
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Emily Fisher Landau in honor of Tom Armstrong
Rights and reproductions
© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
For many vanguard artists in the early twentieth century, music offered a model for expressing nonverbal emotional states and sensations. Georgia O'Keeffe was fascinated with what she called "the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye," but her references to music in the titles of her paintings derived equally from her belief that visual art, like music, could convey powerful emotions independent of representational subject matter. In Music—Pink and Blue II, the swelling, undulating forms imply a connection between the visual and the aural, while also suggesting the rhythms and harmonies that O’Keeffe perceived in nature.