Is Coleman Hawkins’s famous unaccompanied saxophone solo "Picasso" a "Cubist" work? Does Piet Mondriaan’s Broadway Boogie Woogie look like jazz? Does painting change how we hear, and does music change how we see?

"I think the connection is very important to modern art, and I don’t think it’s been explored enough," Harry Cooper recently told a small group of gallery goers at the Sert Gallery in Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Cooper is associate curator of modern art at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and the occasion was one of his regularly scheduled gallery talks for the Sert’s current exhibition, "Duo: Oliver Jackson/Marty Erhlich."

In the spring of 2000, Cooper arranged for painter Jackson and jazz composer Ehrlich to operate in adjoining studios, with the idea that they would create a collaborative work in tribute to the late Julius Hemphill — saxophonist, composer, founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet, and a friend and collaborator of both artists. (Hemphill died in 1995.) Over the course of those 10 weeks, Jackson produced six large canvases that average nine by nine feet and collectively are called "A Garden." Ehrlich, meanwhile, wrote The Long View, a 64-minute piece employing 22 musicians (the recording is available from the German enja label).

The Sert Gallery is a smallish, 20-by-40-foot room with shaded windows in one corner. Two of the facing walls hold two paintings each and two hold one each. Jackson’s canvases are tacked directly to the gray walls and set off by gray frames. Each is semi-abstract, semi-figurative. All recall the free, gestural images of the abstract expressionists, and each is remarkably rich in the variety of its markmaking. One is filled with dense black brush strokes through which patches of white, orange, and turquoise show through. On another, a thick cloud of pinks, blacks, and grays recalls the "pure" abstractions of Philip Guston. The thick twisting strokes of blue and yellow on yet another suggest Willem de Kooning. Figures emerge in some of the works as flat shapes, ghostly outlines, or thick-modeled paint. In any context, these paintings would be a major statement.

Ehrlich’s The Long View is the most ambitious piece of his career in length and scale. Passages for his own solo flutes and saxophones alternate with sections for strings or horns. You can hear in it the massed, roiling counterpoint of Hemphill, as well as Mingus-like shifting tempos and Ehrlich’s own brand of delicate lyricism. Its development and connective tissue — the repeated motifs and harmonic shifts — make it one of a handful of integral long-form works in jazz, beside those by the likes of Hemphill, Mingus, and Ellington.

So how do the pieces work together? In the gallery, Ehrlich’s music plays continuously, with four-minute breaks between "performances." Cooper points out that the two artists did not intend to "illustrate" each other’s work, and neither did they want to "get in each other’s way," either in the process or in the finished work. Each piece is intended to — and does — stand alone. In considering the more mundane effects of combining music and art, Cooper explains that the average viewing time for a single painting is 30 seconds. At the Sert Gallery, it’s been found that the music can drive viewers away immediately or hold them for an hour. Cooper adds that though it’s possible to close one’s eyes and shut out paintings, it’s impossible to view the paintings without hearing the music.

He asks his audience of 10 or so to close their eyes for a few minutes. A solo saxophone gives way to a massive ensemble. We open our eyes and he invites comments. People point out how the music has brought a temporal aspect to the paintings, a narrative. A cataract of blacks and reds and greens now descends into a sea of blue, figures emerge. The brown figures in one painting suggest both the Middle Passage and Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Says Cooper dryly, "Oliver denied both of those interpretations, actually."

Could the paintings have "worked" with another piece of music, or the music with other paintings? Perhaps. But what impressed me was not so much the specificity of reference in these largely abstract works (Ehrlich’s piece has six numbered movements and a postlude; there are no words in it other than the title). Instead, I was struck, despite the dramatic gestures in paint and music, by the room’s peaceful equilibrium, the symmetry of the squarish shape of both the room and the paintings, the two low black benches, the diffuse gallery light and "ambient" projection of sound from several speakers. In "Duo," Jackson and Erhlich have created a unique space, an indoor garden for contemplation, eye and ear.

"Duo" continues at the Sert Gallery, in Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, through January 19. Harry Cooper’s next gallery talk takes place this Saturday, December 7, at 11:30 a.m. Call (617) 495-5444.