Room 1: 1915 / 1916 – Blue

Georgia O’Keeffe's pictures are often moving in their simplicity, like a classical sonata or a love song. "Blue“ is the title of a series of pictures in which O'Keeffe conceivably sought to express her personal experience of music. For example, the shape of the snail resembles that of the violin she was playing at the time. The lines and the intense blue color may also reflect feelings that the painter experienced through music.

Aaron Rosand – Beethoven’s Sonate No. 5 in F Major – Adagio
Play song

Room 2: Biography

Music played a major part in Georgia O’Keeffe's life. In her house in New Mexico she had a high-quality stereo system and a large collection of records, mainly of classical music. Although she was friends with the composer Aaron Copland and, in later years, with the folk music icon Joni Mitchell, she owned very few recordings of contemporary music. In her living room there were LPs of Stravinsky, Gershwin and Edith Piaf, but otherwise the focus was firmly on classical music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, and Haydn, but also the opera composers Verdi, Wagner, and Monteverdi.

Reading room (no song)

Room 3: Blue and Green Music

Around 1920, O’Keeffe painted a series of works exploring the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye. Blue and Green Music is part of this series. The artist chose a palette of blues and greens to replicate the variations of musical notes and transpose them into visual terms.

"Blue in green," to many people, suggests a combination of optimism (green) with a sense of melancholy (blue), as when a moment of happiness, at the achievement of a goal, is inevitably extinguished. This is the point at which green fades into blue (as in the genre of the blues).

Miles Davis – Blue in Green
Play song

Room 4: Flower pictures

O’Keeffe began work on her iconic flower paintings in the mid-1920s. The sensuous blooms, depicted in extreme close-up and filling the entire space of the picture, became her trademark. The focus on detail and the enlargement of the motif lend an abstract quality to the rendering of the natural forms. Andy Warhol was also an admirer of the flower paintings. In 1979 he created a portrait of O’Keeffe, then aged over ninety, in his New York Factory.

Velvet Underground: Ride into the Sun
Play song

Room 5: Skyscrapers/New York

Aaron Copland's Quiet City, played by the English Symphony Orchestra. The music recalls O'Keeffe's pictures of skyscrapers, especially the Shelton Hotel, where she lived after marrying Alfred Stieglitz. A song evoking the image of a city at night, with light coming only from the buildings that rear up into the sky. A hint of jazz is also to be heard.

Aaron Copland: Quiet City
Play song

Room 6: Lake George, 1920s (summer and autumn), New York (winter and spring)

During the 1920s O'Keefe divided her time between Lake George, in the summer, and New York in the winter. This was the era of the Roaring Twenties, when cities like New York pulsated with the rhythms of jazz. New worlds of sound emerged with the advent of the radio, which regularly broadcast the music of modern classical composers such as Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Gershwin. In painting, various artists aspired to create pictures that were like music. Many years later, Brian Eno took up this idea and turned it on its head, in his album On Land. His aim was to make music that was like painting—creating a figurative world by transferring into music what can be done in visual art.

Brian Eno: Unfamiliar Wind
Play Song

Room 7: "This is Not O‘Keeffe Country"

In 1929 O’Keeffe traveled for the first time to Taos in northern New Mexico, where she stayed for several months. She was deeply impressed by the wide-open desert landscape and by the culture of the region, combining indigenous elements with Spanish colonial traditions. "O'Keefe Country" later became a label for the part of New Mexico where Georgia O'Keeffe lived and worked. This has been widely criticized, especially by the indigenous population. The Tewa, a linguistic group of Pueblo Native Americans, settled in this area hundreds of years before O'Keefe moved there. As the indigenous artist Jason Garcia says, the landscape that inspired Georgia O’Keeffe was "Tewa Country, not O’Keeffe Country."

Tewa – The Prisoner Song / Hopi Chants by the fire
Play Song

Room 8: Desert Sessions

Throughout her life, Georgia O’Keeffe engaged very closely, through drawing and painting, with the landscapes and the natural world in which she found the motifs for her work. In the stark landscapes of New Mexico, where she spent the major part of her creative years, she painted hills, flowers, mountains, animal skeletons, or abandoned buildings. An old car served as a mobile studio, providing the artist with shelter when the sun began to beat down mercilessly. What was the appeal of this harsh environment to O’Keeffe? The same landscapes, in which time seems to stand still, have also inspired the band Calexico. The idea for their concept album Black Light came from the desert region of New Mexico and Arizona.

Calexico – Gypsy’s Curse / Close Behind / The Ride Pt. 2
Play Song

Room 9 – Mastering reduction

The bend of a river, a road snaking through the rugged landscape, or a simple black door in the courtyard wall of the artist's house. The later works of Georgia O’Keeffe are severely reduced, and are concerned with wholes, rather than details. O'Keefe herself declared that details were confusing; she preferred to pursue the essence of things. This "less is more" principle also holds a marked fascination for musicians. The composer and pianist John Cage, who was influenced by Zen Buddhism, even wrote pieces of silence to achieve a total musical reduction.

John Cage: In A Landscape
Play Song