Georgia O'Keeffe made her first abstract charcoal drawings in 1915.
In 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O'Keeffe began a series of charcoal drawings that reduced natural forms to lines, curves, and tonal shapes. These works marked a decisive break from the academic realism she had learned in art school.
She sent some of the drawings to her former classmate Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz exhibited them at his New York gallery, 291, in 1916. That exhibition helped launch O'Keeffe's professional career and led to a long personal and artistic relationship between the two artists.
The 1915 drawings are important because they demonstrate that O'Keeffe was exploring abstraction before her best-known flower paintings. They were not simply enlarged botanical studies; they were experiments in rhythm, movement, and feeling through nonrepresentational form.