Which teacher's 1912 ideas helped Georgia O'Keeffe develop her move toward abstraction?

Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas helped Georgia O'Keeffe move toward abstraction in 1912.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow's principles while studying at the University of Virginia with Alon Bement, who had studied under Dow. Dow emphasized composition, line, color, and harmony rather than the academic requirement to copy nature literally. This approach gave O'Keeffe a new way to organize visual experience.

The influence was especially important because O'Keeffe had become dissatisfied with conventional academic art training. She later produced a series of abstract charcoal drawings in 1915, works that reduced forms and sensations to dynamic lines and shapes.

Dow did not teach O'Keeffe through a long personal apprenticeship in the way the question is sometimes described. His published ideas and the teaching of his followers were the direct route by which his principles reached her. O'Keeffe developed those principles into a highly individual language.