Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas about line, color, and composition shaped Georgia O'Keeffe's early abstract work.
Dow argued that art should be organized through the relationships of visual elements rather than by copying nature exactly. O'Keeffe encountered his approach while studying at the University of Virginia and later teaching art. His emphasis gave her a framework for using simplified forms and expressive arrangements.
O'Keeffe's charcoal abstractions of 1915 and 1916 grew from this intellectual shift. They were among the first purely abstract works produced by an American artist and were later shown by Alfred Stieglitz. Dow is sometimes confused with O'Keeffe's other teachers, including William Merritt Chase and Alon Bement, but Dow was the educator most directly associated with the compositional principles she adopted.