Which artist and teacher became Georgia O'Keeffe's influential mentor at Columbia?

Arthur Wesley Dow became Georgia O'Keeffe's influential mentor through her studies at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

O'Keeffe studied with Arthur Wesley Dow in New York in 1914 and 1915. Dow taught that art could be organized through line, color, and tonal relationships rather than simply through realistic imitation. His ideas gave O'Keeffe a framework for developing an individual style and encouraged her to treat composition as an expressive structure.

This teaching was especially important because O'Keeffe had already become frustrated with the academic methods she had learned in earlier schools. Dow’s approach helped her move toward abstraction. She later sent a group of charcoal drawings based on these ideas to the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited them in 1916.

Dow was not the artist who discovered O'Keeffe in the popular version of the story; that role is usually associated with Stieglitz. Dow’s importance was different: he provided the artistic principles that helped her break away from conventional realism.