Arthur Wesley Dow influenced Georgia O'Keeffe’s approach to composition while she studied at Columbia University Teachers College. Dow emphasized the expressive arrangement of line, color, and tone rather than strict imitation of visible objects.
O'Keeffe studied with Dow in 1914 and 1915. His ideas helped her move beyond the academic realism she had learned earlier at art schools in Chicago and New York. His teaching encouraged her to think of art as an organized visual language, which supported her experiments with abstraction.
This influence is particularly important because O'Keeffe’s abstract work developed before her best-known flower and New Mexico paintings. Her early charcoal drawings reduced forms to sweeping lines and tonal structures. The paintings were not simply copies of landscapes or objects; they explored how forms could be rearranged to create feeling.
Dow was not O'Keeffe’s only influence. She also encountered European modernism and American photographers through Stieglitz’s circle. Still, Dow provides the clearest answer when the question concerns the teacher who shaped her compositional thinking at Columbia.