Which art educator's design theories strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's early abstractions?

Arthur Wesley Dow strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's early abstractions.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow’s ideas while studying at the University of Virginia summer school and later at Columbia University Teachers College, where Dow taught. His approach emphasized the organized use of line, color, and tone rather than merely copying what an object looked like.

Those principles helped O'Keeffe move away from academic realism. Her early abstract drawings and paintings explore rhythm, structure, and simplified forms, showing how composition itself could become the subject.

Dow was not O'Keeffe’s husband, gallery promoter, or the photographer associated with her later public career. Those roles belong to different figures in her biography. Dow’s importance was primarily pedagogical: his teaching gave O'Keeffe a framework for thinking about art as an arrangement of visual elements. This influence is especially significant when studying the transition between her formal training and the abstract works that attracted Alfred Stieglitz’s attention.