Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the few figures in American art during the 1920s and 1930s who painted in her own way, unlike painted in Europe.
One of them was Jack-in-the-Pulpit no IV a sharply focus close up view of petals and leaves in which organic forms become powerful abstract compositions.
O’Keeffe captures the growing plants slow controlled motion while converting the plants into a powerful abstract composition of lines, forms, and colors. The paintings showed only the ‘Jack’ for the flower reflected her objective to enlarge and further simplify the form.
Jack-in-the Pulpit is a member of the Arum family, a small group of primitive flowering plants whose name comes from the Arabic word for ‘fire’. Anyone who has taste the raw root quickly understand the meaning.
O’Keeffe’s greatly enlarged flower paintings in Jack-in-the-Pulpit IV of 1930, embody both principles of model-making and of time.
Jack-in-the-Pulpit no IV (1930) by Georgia O’Keeffe
