Georgia O'Keeffe’s early drawings first shown by Alfred Stieglitz in 1916 were primarily made with charcoal.
The drawings were abstract, spare, and largely monochromatic. Anita Pollitzer brought them to Stieglitz, who exhibited them at 291 in New York. Their presentation surprised O'Keeffe, but it established an important connection between her work and the emerging American modernist movement.
O'Keeffe later became famous for oil paintings of flowers, bones, skyscrapers, and desert landscapes, so viewers sometimes assume oil was the medium of her breakthrough. Her first public exhibition through Stieglitz instead centered on works on paper made with charcoal.
These drawings also helped produce an early critical interpretation of O'Keeffe’s art as symbolic or autobiographical. She rejected many such readings and emphasized the visual experience of forms, lines, and natural subjects.