Georgia O'Keeffe used charcoal for the abstract drawings that brought her work to Alfred Stieglitz's attention in 1916. These works were largely nonrepresentational and were among the earliest purely abstract images made by an American artist.
O'Keeffe created the drawings in 1915 while teaching in South Carolina. Their sweeping lines and concentrated forms expressed movement and feeling without depicting a recognizable landscape, object, or figure. A friend, Anita Pollitzer, showed some of them to Stieglitz at his gallery, 291.
Stieglitz exhibited the drawings in 1916, helping establish O'Keeffe as a significant modernist. She later expanded her experiments into watercolor and oil painting, and her mature work included both abstraction and recognizable subjects. The charcoal drawings are not the same as her later flower paintings, although both use enlarged forms and simplified shapes.