Alon Bement encouraged Georgia O'Keeffe to develop her own artistic style at the University of Virginia.
O'Keeffe taught and studied at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville between 1912 and 1914. Alon Bement, an instructor associated with the university's summer program, introduced her to ideas influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow emphasized composition, line, color, and personal expression rather than simply copying visible objects.
That approach mattered because O'Keeffe was searching for a way to make art that expressed her own responses instead of following academic formulas. She later made a series of bold charcoal abstractions in 1915, works that helped establish her as one of the first American artists to practice pure abstraction.
Arthur Wesley Dow was also crucial to her development, but he was her teacher at Columbia University Teachers College in New York, not the specific instructor named here. The two men are therefore easy to confuse in accounts of O'Keeffe's artistic education.