Georgia O'Keeffe

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 Abstraction - No. 5 is the largest painting in the series. Individual plant forms have reached such a degree of abstraction that they are difficult to identify. The predominant purple color indicates the interior of the spathe, and the rounded tips of what are presumably three spadices appear on the left. A white stripe similar to that in Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV appears just left of center in the composition.

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 and Edward Steichen, and were to some extent paralleled in the paintings of Charles Demuth, O’Keeffe rendered them at an unprecedented scale and became more closely associated with flower imagery than her male peers.