Audio Tour Stop 8

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, Georgia O’Keeffe

West Building Ground Floor, Gallery G6
Part of East Building: Featured Selections

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 flowering plant at Lake George in New York. Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV presents a magnified view of the tongue-like spadix set against the spathe’s cavernous, dark purple interior. Green foliage and a hint of cloudy sky are confined to the upper right and left corners.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV (English)
An abstracted painting of a roughly oval-shaped jack-in-the-pulpit flower fills this vertical composition with cool, saturated blues, grays, and greens. A royal-blue elongated, rounded core at the bottom center is surrounded by a pale gray flame-like shape. Petals flare outward and up around the core to reach toward the sides and top of the canvas. A thin white line extends upward from the top center of the core to meet the pointed tip of the unfurling, innermost midnight-blue petal. Layers of green, reminiscent of leaves, curl outward around the top half of the flower. Pale blue in each of the four corners creates the impression of a background behind the flower, and fades to white at the top corners.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930, oil on canvas, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe, © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1987.58.3

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