Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV

In her youth, Georgia O’Keeffe had been particularly fascinated by the jack-in-the-pulpit. In 1930, she executed a series of six paintings of the common North American herbaceous flowering plant at Lake George in New York. The National Gallery of Art is home to five of these six works: Jack-in-Pulpit - No. 2,_ Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3_, this work, Jack-in-Pulpit Abstraction - No. 5, and _Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI._ _Jack in the Pulpit No. IV_ presents a magnified view of the spadix set against the spathe’s cavernous, dark purple interior. The composition is bifurcated by a narrow strip of white that emerges from the tip of the spadix. Green foliage and a hint of cloudy sky are confined to the upper right and left corners.

The large, magnified representations of flowers that O’Keeffe embarked upon in the 1920s became her most famous subjects. Although such images had antecedents in the photographs of Paul Strand (American, 1890 - 1976) andEdward Steichen (American, 1879 - 1973), and were to some extent paralleled in the paintings of Charles Demuth (American, 1883 - 1935), O’Keeffe rendered them at an unprecedented scale and became more closely associated with flower imagery than her male peers.