What was Georgia O'Keeffe's first abstract charcoal drawing, made in 1915?

Drawing XIII was Georgia O'Keeffe's first abstract charcoal drawing, made in 1915.

The drawing belongs to a breakthrough group of largely abstract works O'Keeffe made in charcoal while teaching in South Carolina. Rather than copying visible objects, she used lines, curves, and tonal relationships to explore visual experience directly.

She sent several of these drawings to Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Stieglitz exhibited them at his gallery 291 in 1916, making O'Keeffe one of the first American artists to work with fully abstract imagery.

The title Drawing XIII is easy to confuse with the later Blue Lines or with O'Keeffe's numbered abstraction series. Her numbering reflects groups of works and does not mean that every numbered title belongs to one continuous sequence. The charcoal experiments were a turning point before her later paintings expanded abstraction into color.