Georgia O'Keeffe’s 1915 series Specials marked her breakthrough into abstraction.
The series began with a group of charcoal drawings made while she was teaching in South Carolina. These works reduced landscapes and natural forms to dynamic lines, curves, and shapes rather than depicting recognizable objects in a conventional manner.
O'Keeffe sent the drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Stieglitz exhibited them at 291 in 1916, making them among the earliest abstract works by an American woman to receive serious attention in that setting.
The series is sometimes confused with O'Keeffe’s later flower paintings, such as Black Iris, or with Blue and Green Music. Those works also use abstraction, but Specials refers specifically to the important 1915 charcoal series.