Arthur Wesley Dow’s ideas about design strongly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe at the University of Virginia.
Dow was an American artist and influential teacher who emphasized composition through line, color, and tone rather than simple imitation of nature. O’Keeffe encountered his approach while taking summer classes at the University of Virginia, where she studied with Alon Bement, one of Dow’s former students.
This influence was decisive because it offered O’Keeffe an alternative to the academic realism she had learned earlier. Dow’s principles encouraged her to organize visual elements for their expressive power. She later applied those ideas in charcoal abstractions that helped establish her modernist direction.
O’Keeffe did not study directly under Dow in the same way she studied with some other teachers. The connection came through Bement and Dow’s published teaching methods, a detail sometimes simplified in biographies.