Georgia O'Keeffe
American, 1887 - 1986
Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930
oil on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm (40 x 30 in.)
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe
1987.58.3

  From the Tour: Selections from the 20th-Century Collections

  In 1930, Georgia O'Keeffe painted a series of six canvases depicting a jack-in-the-pulpit. The series begins with the striped and hooded bloom rendered with a botanist's care, continues with successively more abstract and tightly focused depictions, and ends with the essence of the jack-in-the-pulpit, a haloed black pistil standing alone against a black, purple, and gray field.

  Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV represents a midpoint in this process of concurrently increasing detail and abstraction. If O'Keeffe consistently found her strongest inspiration in nature, she believed that the immanence of nature could be discovered in and through the refinement of form. Thus in the jack-in-the-pulpits, abstraction becomes a metaphor of, and an equivalent for, knowledge -- the closest view of the flower yields an abstract image; the most profound knowledge of the subject reveals its abstract form.

   O'Keeffe bequeathed Jack-in-the-Pulpit II-VI to the National Gallery in 1987. Also included in that bequest were three paintings ranging in date from 1927 to 1963.

                  from:www.nga.gov                               →Nextpage