Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1915 series widely regarded as her first experiments with pure abstraction is the Specials series.
The series grew from a breakthrough period when O’Keeffe began making bold charcoal drawings that reduced landscape and natural forms to sweeping lines and shapes. She sent some of these works to Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited them at his 291 gallery in New York. Their near-total departure from recognizable subject matter made them unusual in American art at the time.
O’Keeffe later returned to identifiable flowers, buildings, bones, and landscapes, but abstraction remained central to her visual language. The Specials drawings are therefore important not because they represent her only abstract work, but because they reveal an early, decisive attempt to communicate through form rather than description.
The series can be confused with named groups from her later career, such as the Canna, Pelvis, and Jack-in-the-Pulpit paintings. Those series use recognizable subjects, whereas the 1915 Specials are associated with her earliest mature abstract experiments.