Georgia O'Keeffe created her breakthrough charcoal abstractions in 1915.
That year, while teaching in South Carolina, O'Keeffe produced a series of bold charcoal drawings built from lines, curves, and simplified forms. Rather than copying recognizable objects, she explored how shapes and marks could communicate feeling and movement.
She sent some of these drawings to a friend, the artist Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Stieglitz was impressed and exhibited them at his gallery 291 in 1916. The display helped bring O'Keeffe's work to the attention of the American art world.
The drawings are important because they marked a decisive break from the academic realism O'Keeffe had been taught. They are not the same as her later flower paintings, although both bodies of work rely on close attention to line, form, and abstraction.