Georgia O'Keeffe used charcoal for her 1915 series of nonrepresentational drawings.
The series consisted of abstract works made with simple black charcoal marks on paper. Rather than depicting recognizable objects, O'Keeffe explored line, shape, movement, and rhythm. These drawings are among the clearest early examples of her effort to create a personal visual language.
She sent some of the drawings to Anita Pollitzer, a former classmate, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Stieglitz exhibited them at 291 in 1916, helping bring O'Keeffe's work to public attention. The charcoal medium made the directness of the compositions especially clear, with sweeping lines and areas of dense darkness.
O'Keeffe later became famous for oil paintings of flowers, buildings, bones, and landscapes, but the 1915 drawings are crucial to understanding her development. They were not preparatory sketches for a single conventional subject; they were finished experiments in abstraction.