Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1926 painting Black Iris enlarges a single dark iris flower across the canvas.
The work is one of O’Keeffe’s best-known flower paintings. She used close-up views and enlarged scale to make a flower fill the picture, encouraging viewers to notice its folds, edges, gradients, and abstract shapes rather than treating it as a small botanical object.
Black Iris is often discussed alongside her other flower paintings, including Red Canna and Oriental Poppies. Critics and viewers have frequently interpreted her flowers symbolically or sexually, but O’Keeffe rejected the idea that viewers needed to impose such meanings on them.
The painting is commonly identified simply as Black Iris, although O’Keeffe created several works involving irises. The best-known 1926 canvas is also frequently catalogued as Black Iris III.