Which art educator’s ideas strongly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe’s move toward abstraction?

Arthur Wesley Dow’s ideas strongly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe’s move toward abstraction. Dow taught that composition could be built from line, color, and tonal relationships rather than from literal representation alone.

O’Keeffe encountered Dow’s approach while studying and teaching art in the 1910s. His emphasis offered her an alternative to the academic exercises based on copying objects and imitating established styles. She began developing more personal compositions from simplified forms and expressive lines.

That influence became especially visible in her 1915 charcoal drawings, which move beyond recognizable landscape description into nonobjective abstraction. These works were among the first completely abstract images produced by an American artist of her stature and helped attract Alfred Stieglitz’s attention.

Dow did not teach O’Keeffe to paint a specific subject or adopt a single style. His importance was methodological: he encouraged her to organize visual elements according to their expressive power. O’Keeffe later developed that principle independently in flowers, bones, buildings, and landscapes.