Which teacher introduced Georgia O'Keeffe to influential ideas about abstract composition?

Arthur Wesley Dow introduced Georgia O'Keeffe to influential ideas about abstract composition.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow’s teaching in 1912 while studying at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York. Dow emphasized the organized use of line, color, and tone rather than copying nature exactly. His approach offered O'Keeffe a way to make art from personal responses and formal relationships.

This influence was crucial because O'Keeffe had become dissatisfied with the academic methods she had learned in earlier training. She later said that Dow’s ideas gave her a different way to think about art. Her charcoal abstractions of 1915, which she sent to a friend, eventually reached Alfred Stieglitz and led to her first exhibitions at 291.

Dow was not O'Keeffe’s only teacher, and he did not create her distinctive style for her. His importance lies in providing a conceptual framework that helped her develop her own radical experiments with abstraction.