Alon Bement introduced Georgia O’Keeffe to Arthur Wesley Dow’s ideas about art.
While teaching art in Virginia, O’Keeffe studied with Alon Bement, who had been associated with the ideas of educator and artist Arthur Wesley Dow. Bement’s teaching helped direct her attention away from copying objects and toward the expressive possibilities of line, composition, and color.
Dow’s principles became especially important when O’Keeffe began making a series of abstract charcoal drawings in 1915. These works were among the earliest purely abstract creations produced by an American artist, and she sent them to Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited them at his New York gallery. Bement is sometimes overlooked because Dow’s name is more closely associated with the artistic theory, while Bement was the teacher who transmitted those ideas to O’Keeffe. Their influence helped shape her independent modernist vocabulary.