Which teacher's design ideas influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's breakthrough drawings?

Arthur Wesley Dow's design ideas influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's breakthrough drawings.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow's approach through Alon Bement, who taught at the University of Virginia summer school where O'Keeffe studied in 1912. Dow emphasized composition, line, tone, and the expressive arrangement of forms rather than simply copying visible reality. These ideas offered O'Keeffe a way to make art that was personal and structurally bold.

In 1915, she created a series of abstract charcoal drawings that represented a major break from her academic training. Alfred Stieglitz later exhibited some of them, but he was a gallery owner and photographer, not the teacher whose design theory prompted the change. William Merritt Chase was one of O'Keeffe's earlier instructors at the Art Students League, while Dow supplied the more direct intellectual stimulus for this experimental period.