Georgia O'Keeffe's Specials series is widely recognized as her first group of purely abstract drawings.
O'Keeffe made the charcoal drawings known as the Specials in 1915 while teaching in South Carolina. The works used sweeping lines, curves, and tonal contrasts rather than recognizable objects. They were a decisive break from the representational art she had been trained to produce.
She sent some of the drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Stieglitz exhibited them at his gallery 291 in 1916. That exhibition brought O'Keeffe into the New York modern-art network and began the long professional relationship between the two artists.
The term Specials can be confused with later O'Keeffe series such as the Pelvis paintings or her Lake George works. Those later groups often drew on identifiable natural forms, while the 1915 charcoal drawings are especially important for their nonrepresentational approach. The series helped establish O'Keeffe as an early American abstract artist.