Alon Bement encouraged Georgia O’Keeffe’s early abstract experiments at the University of Virginia.
O’Keeffe worked as an assistant to Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville during the early 1910s. Bement was an educator connected with the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose teaching emphasized design principles such as line, color, and composition rather than strict imitation of nature.
This approach became important in O’Keeffe’s artistic development. Dow’s influence, transmitted partly through Bement, helped her think of art as an arrangement of visual elements. Her later charcoal abstractions reduced natural forms to lines, shapes, and rhythms, marking a decisive break from conventional academic realism.
Arthur Wesley Dow was also a major influence, but he was not the teacher who employed O’Keeffe at Virginia. O’Keeffe later studied directly with Dow at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York. That distinction explains why both names frequently appear in accounts of her early career.