Which educator's ideas helped Georgia O'Keeffe reject traditional art instruction?

Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas helped Georgia O'Keeffe reject traditional art instruction.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow's principles through Alon Bement, who taught at the University of Virginia and had studied with Dow. Dow emphasized composition, line, color, and spatial relationships rather than simply copying the visible world.

This approach gave O'Keeffe a way to think about art as an arrangement of formal elements. It became especially important when she began making abstract charcoal drawings in 1915 and 1916. Those works were not ordinary illustrations of objects; they explored rhythm, shape, and movement.

Dow was an educator and art theorist rather than a figure known chiefly for painting. That distinction can cause confusion with O'Keeffe's other teachers, including William Merritt Chase. Dow's influence mattered because it encouraged O'Keeffe to develop an individual visual language instead of following the academic model she had first learned.