Arthur Wesley Dow influenced Georgia O’Keeffe’s move toward abstraction through his ideas about line, color, and composition. Dow taught that art could be organized through formal relationships rather than only through realistic imitation.
O’Keeffe encountered Dow’s approach while studying and teaching art in the early 1910s. His methods gave her a framework for simplifying forms and arranging visual elements according to their expressive power.
This influence helped separate her later work from the academic realism she had learned earlier. Her charcoal abstractions of 1915 and 1916 reduced landscapes and natural forms to dynamic lines and shapes.
Dow was not the only important teacher in O’Keeffe’s education. William Merritt Chase taught her at the Art Students League, but Chase represented a more traditional academic approach. Dow’s principles were especially important to her modernist development.