Georgia O'Keeffe's 1915 charcoal drawings are recognized as some of the earliest purely abstract artworks produced in America.
While teaching in South Carolina, O'Keeffe began making a group of experimental charcoal drawings that reduced forms to sweeping lines and tonal contrasts. Rather than depicting recognizable objects, the works explored visual relationships and personal sensation.
She sent several drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Stieglitz exhibited some of them at his gallery in 1916, making the drawings an important early step in O'Keeffe’s public career.
The works are often called the 1915 charcoal drawings, but they were not a single formally titled series in the way some later groups were. Their importance lies in their radical abstraction and in their role in bringing O'Keeffe to the attention of the New York modernist community.