Which teacher's design principles strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe after 1912?

Arthur Wesley Dow’s design principles strongly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe after 1912.

O’Keeffe encountered Dow’s ideas while studying at the University of Virginia’s summer school and through his textbook Composition. Dow encouraged students to build art from line, color, and tonal relationships rather than simply reproduce appearances. This approach offered O’Keeffe an alternative to the academic realism she had been taught earlier.

She later described Dow’s teaching as a turning point. His emphasis on composition helped her develop increasingly simplified and abstract works, including the charcoal drawings that attracted Alfred Stieglitz’s attention in 1916.

Dow was not the same teacher as William Merritt Chase, who taught O’Keeffe at the Art Students League. Chase represented an earlier phase of her conventional training, while Dow’s design philosophy helped open the path toward her distinctive modernist language.