Which art educator’s ideas strongly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstract approach?

Arthur Wesley Dow strongly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstract approach. His teaching emphasized composition, line, tone, and color rather than simply reproducing the visible world.

O’Keeffe encountered Dow’s ideas while studying at the University of Virginia and later at Columbia University Teachers College, where she worked with Dow’s teaching methods. The approach helped her think of art as an arrangement of visual elements, giving her a foundation for increasingly experimental drawings and paintings.

This influence is important because O’Keeffe did not begin as an entirely self-taught modernist. She had academic training, but Dow’s principles offered a path beyond strict realism. Her later abstractions, including charcoal drawings from 1915 and 1916, translated natural sensations and forms into simplified compositions rather than literal illustrations.