Which teacher's ideas about composition transformed Georgia O'Keeffe's artistic direction?

Arthur Wesley Dow’s ideas about composition transformed Georgia O'Keeffe’s artistic direction.

O'Keeffe encountered Arthur Wesley Dow’s teaching while studying at Columbia University Teachers College in New York. Dow emphasized the arrangement of line, mass, and color rather than the direct imitation of nature. This approach offered O'Keeffe a way to make art through personal responses and formal relationships instead of simply reproducing what she saw.

The influence was especially important after O'Keeffe became dissatisfied with the academic realism she had learned earlier. She began producing highly abstract charcoal drawings in 1915, works that explored line and form without depicting recognizable objects. Anita Pollitzer later showed some of these drawings to Alfred Stieglitz, helping launch O'Keeffe’s professional career. William Merritt Chase was an earlier teacher at the Art Students League, but Dow’s theories are the ones most directly associated with this decisive change in O'Keeffe’s style.