Arthur Wesley Dow taught Georgia O'Keeffe composition ideas that influenced her abstract style at Teachers College.
O'Keeffe studied with Dow at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York during the 1910s. Dow emphasized the arrangement of line, color, and tonal relationships rather than copying nature literally.
His teaching helped O'Keeffe move away from the strict academic realism she had encountered in earlier training. She began making abstract charcoal drawings based on personal responses to landscape, music, and movement.
Dow was not O'Keeffe's only important teacher. She also studied in Chicago and at the Art Students League, while her later development drew on her own experiments. Still, Dow's design principles were a key bridge between academic training and her mature abstraction.