Georgia O'Keeffe's 1916 charcoal drawing often identified as her first purely abstract work is Drawing XIII.
The work belongs to a group of abstract charcoal drawings O'Keeffe made while teaching in South Carolina. Instead of depicting a recognizable object, she used lines, curves, and tonal contrasts to explore feeling and visual rhythm. These drawings were among the works that attracted Alfred Stieglitz’s attention.
O'Keeffe’s early abstractions were important in the development of American modernism. She later produced paintings that combined recognizable natural forms with simplified, abstract structures, so the boundary between “abstract” and “representational” in her career is not always absolute.
Titles and Roman numerals can cause confusion because O'Keeffe created several related drawings in the same period. Drawing XIII is the specific work commonly cited in accounts of her breakthrough into abstraction, not a general title for the entire series.