Arthur Wesley Dow strongly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe’s teaching and early abstractions.
O’Keeffe encountered Dow’s ideas while studying at the University of Virginia and through his influential book Composition. Dow argued that artists could organize line, color, and tone according to principles of design rather than simply reproduce the visible world.
These ideas offered O’Keeffe an alternative to the academic realism she had learned earlier. They helped her think of art as a process of arranging visual elements and encouraged the abstract exercises that later attracted Stieglitz’s attention.
Dow was an American artist, educator, and printmaker who promoted Japanese-inspired principles of composition alongside broader modernist approaches. O’Keeffe later taught art and used exercises based on design and abstraction. She did not merely imitate Dow; instead, she adapted his emphasis on structure into an individual language of sweeping lines, organic forms, and simplified shapes.