The flower in Georgia O'Keeffe's 1924 painting Black Iris is an iris.
O'Keeffe enlarged the flower so that its petals occupy nearly the entire composition. The dark, velvety forms and tightly cropped view turn a familiar botanical subject into an abstract-looking study of curves, folds, and color.
Black Iris belongs to the group of flower paintings that made O'Keeffe one of the best-known American modernists. She repeatedly argued that viewers should be given time to look at flowers because their small scale in nature made people overlook their visual complexity.
The painting is sometimes discussed alongside O'Keeffe's later works such as Black Iris III, but those are separate paintings. The 1924 work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.