There is a story that when famed photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz first saw the abstract charcoal drawings of Georgia O'Keeffe back around 1916, he declared, "Finally, a woman on paper!"

Maybe that was apocryphal, but the works he saw were revolutionary for O'Keeffe, who up until then had been doing solely representational work.

She would return to them again and again through her long and extraordinary career.

Lithographs of some of those drawings, which O'Keeffe made in 1968, are now on display at the Demuth Museum in "A Kinship in Art: Charles Demuth and Georgia O'Keeffe."

"They created a source for her throughout the years," says Anne Lampe, executive director of the museum.

You can see the ideas of many of her famous later works forming in these lines and curves, in the implications of what they represent.

"She was locking herself in her studio doing these works," says Lampe. "She called it learning to walk again. She got rid of everything she learned in art school, everything she learned from her teacher."

The lithographs are of amazing quality, Lampe notes.

"You get a real feel for the smudgy feeling," she says. "Only an artist would do that."

Lampe believes that the pieces need to be seen in person.

"You need to spend time with them," she says. "They are really a breakthrough into abstraction in a way no other American had done. She was really leading the way."

After seeing those drawings, Stieglitz gave O'Keeffe a show in New York in 1917, and through him, she met many of the leaders of the American modern art movement, including Charles Demuth.

The two, who called each other O'Keeffe and Deem, became friends, though not a lot is known about the extent of the friendship since there are few letters between them.

But before she married Stieglitz and before she began spending more and more time out west, O'Keeffe often visited Demuth in Lancaster.

She stayed at the Weber Hotel, then located across the street from the Demuth house on East King Street.

She ate meals with Demuth and his mother, Augusta, and painted with Demuth in the garden.

Neither was interested in verbally explaining their works or describing what you were supposed to see in them.

O'Keeffe once said that "shapes and colors are more exact to me than words," while Demuth once stated, "to me words explain too much and say too little."

O'Keeffe is quoted in a New York Times magazine article from 1969: "(Demuth) was a better friend to me than any of the other artists."

Their bond must have been strong because Demuth willed all of his oil paintings to O'Keeffe.

"A Woman on Paper" is also the name of a new musical that's being put on by Lancaster Opera. which opens Thursday at the Roschel Performing Arts Center.

Lampe liked the idea of having a connection between the two.

"I wanted to give people an opportunity to really understand her artwork," she says. "Experience them in real life in tandem with the musical. It's a great bringing together of things."

"A Kinship in Art: Charles Demuth

and Georgia O'Keeffe"

Cont. through Oct. 3

Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Sun. 1-4 p.m. Admission by donation

Demuth Museum

120 E. King St. (rear), 299-9940
www.demuth.org