Jack-in-Pulpit - No. 2

1930

Georgia O'Keeffe

Painter, American, 1887 - 1986

A close-up view of a deep plum-purple jack-in-the-pulpit flower surrounded by emerald-green leaves fills this vertical painting. The flower is narrow at its base, where it is striped with white and pale lilac purple, and it flares open like a trumpet in the top half of this composition. The unfurled petal is streaked with wavy white and magenta-pink veins around a deep purple tube-like stalk emerging from inside the base. Leaves in spring and kelly green billow up around the base of the flower along the bottom of the canvas, and more leaves surround the top of the flower. The area behind the pointed, curling tip of the flower glows with a lemon-lime yellow. The space around the flower and bewteen the green leaves is mauve pink.

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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: this one, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, Jack-in-the-Pulpit Abstraction – No. 5, and Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI. In this particular work, the plant is set against a pale mauve background, and all four corners of the composition are occupied by green foliage.

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. She ultimately became more closely associated with flower imagery than her male peers.

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Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Jack-in-Pulpit - No. 2, 1930

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist [1887-1986]; her estate; bequest 1987 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1931

  • Georgia O'Keeffe, An American Place, New York, 1931, one of nos. 7-11.

1932

  • Possibly Twenty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings by American Artists, City Art Museum, St. Louis, August-October 1932, no. 37 (this may also be NGA 1987.58.2).

  • Possibly Exhibition of The American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 1932, no. 105, as Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

1943

  • Georgia O'Keeffe, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1943, no. 37, repro.

1953

  • Possibly An Exhibition of Paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; The Mayo Hill Galleries, Delray Beach, Florida, 1953, no. 13, as Jack in the Pulpit.

1970

  • Georgia O'Keeffe Retrospective Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Art, 1970-1971, no. 66, repro.

1984

  • Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1984, unnumbered catalogue, frontispiece, fig. 56.

2009

  • Dove/O'Keeffe: Circles of Influence, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 2009, pl. 56.

  • Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2009-2010, unnumbered catalogue, pl. 118.

2011

  • 25th Year Anniversary Exhibition, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, 2011-2013, no catalogue.

2013

  • Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George, The Hyde Collection Art Museum, Glens Falls; Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, 2013-2014, no. 51, repro.

2015

  • Collection Conversations: The Chrysler and the National Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, 2015-2016, no catalogue.

2016

  • O'Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in New York, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, 2016, no. 59, fig. 8.

Bibliography

1976

  • O’Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York, 1976: color pl. 39.

1984

  • Hoffman, Katherine. An Enduring Spirit: The Art of Georgia O’Keeffe. Metuchen, NJ, 1984: 104.

1992

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 250, repro.

1995

  • Benke, Britta. Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986: Flowers in the Desert. Cologne, 1995: 42, color repro.

1996

  • Wagner, Anne Middleton. Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe. Berkeley, 1996: 70-72, color pl. 9.

1999

  • Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New Haven and London, 1999: 1:433, no. 716, color repro.

2004

  • Eldredge, Charles C. “Skunk Cabbages, Seasons and Cycles.” In Joseph S. Czestochowski, ed., Georgia O’Keeffe: Vision of the Sublime. Memphis, 2004: 71-72, pl. 41.

2016

  • Roberts, Ellen E. O'Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in New York. Exh. cat. Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Portland (Maine) Museum of Art. West Palm Beach, 2016: 123 fig. 8, 127-128, 150 no. 59.

Inscriptions

upper left reverse: Jack in Pulpit-No 2-30 / signed within five-pointed star: OK

Wikidata ID

Q20192831

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