Which New York art teacher strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's early modernist style?

Arthur Wesley Dow strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's early modernist style.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow's ideas while studying at Columbia University Teachers College in New York. Dow emphasized composition, including relationships among line, color, and tone, rather than requiring artists to imitate nature literally. Those principles gave O'Keeffe a framework for exploring abstraction.

Her charcoal drawings of 1915, later shown to Alfred Stieglitz, reflected this new direction. They were among the works that brought her to the attention of the New York art world, even though she had not yet developed the flower paintings for which she became famous.

Dow was not O'Keeffe's only teacher. She also studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where other instructors shaped her academic training. His importance lies particularly in the compositional ideas that encouraged her independent experimentation.