Arthur Wesley Dow influenced Georgia O’Keeffe through ideas about composition and abstraction.
O’Keeffe encountered Dow’s teaching after her academic training had left her dissatisfied with conventional methods of representation. Dow emphasized line, color, and tonal relationships as fundamental elements of art. His approach encouraged students to construct images through design rather than simply copy what they saw.
O’Keeffe studied with Dow’s colleague Alon Bement at the University of Virginia and later worked with Dow at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York. Dow did not teach her to paint a particular recognizable subject; instead, his ideas helped her think more freely about visual structure. This influence is often cited as a turning point in her movement toward abstraction, although her mature art developed through many later experiences and experiments.