Music–Pink and Blue No. 1

Georgia O'Keeffe

1918

Oil on canvas

Seattle Art Museum

“I want real things—live people to take hold of—to see—and talk to—Music that makes holes in the sky,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in 1916. Two years later, she realized her joyous vision in this painting, whose swirling forms resonate almost audibly as they encircle a deep blue void. For O’Keeffe, abstraction served as a sustaining mode for developing pictorial equivalents to her own, intangible emotions. This is her first major oil painting, and its title and color harmonies alone declare that the world she had dreamed in 1916 had finally coalesced. Gift of Barney A. Ebsworth The artist, through 1974; sold through Doris Bry, New York,