Which teacher's ideas about art strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe at Teachers College?

Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe while she studied at Teachers College.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow's teaching through Alon Bement, one of Dow's assistants, while she attended Teachers College of Columbia University in New York. Dow emphasized the expressive arrangement of line, color, and tone rather than imitation of nature. That approach offered O'Keeffe a way to make art from personal responses and formal relationships.

The influence was important because it helped her move beyond the academic realism she had learned earlier. In 1915, while teaching in South Carolina, she produced a series of charcoal abstractions that demonstrated this new direction. She sent some of the drawings to a friend, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz.

William Merritt Chase was a different teacher who taught O'Keeffe at the Art Students League. Chase influenced her academic training, but Dow's principles are the ones most closely associated with her early move toward abstraction.