Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI
Georgia O’Keefe
GEORGIA O’KEEFE, 1930. OIL ON CANVAS.
The last painting in her much revered series, O’Keefe takes the flower to its abstract conclusion. She turns the stigma into a surreal form, the hues of the petals become a expansive background to a winding road. She reduces nature into something formal and emotional, and requires the viewer to read it as they like. “I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown.” Said O’Keefe, “So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.” When she began her Jack-in-the-Pulpit series, which sees the flowers move across four canvases from reality to abstraction, Georgia O’Keefe was all but unknown. A female modernist painter in a male dominated world, attempting to carve a name for herself. By the time the series was completed, she had gained reputation and with it, speculation. Every viewer tried to create their own narrative of the artist from her paintings of flowers, casting her as an artist of repression, of longing, of lust, of feminism, of tradition. But O’Keefe has long defied any easy narrative, she is an artist of America and as broad and complicated as the country she captured, through its abstraction and its reality.