Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas about line, color, and design influenced Georgia O'Keeffe at Columbia University.
O'Keeffe studied with Dow in New York in 1914 and 1915 while taking classes at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dow taught that an artwork could be organized through formal elements such as line, color, and tone rather than by simply copying nature. This approach gave O'Keeffe a new way to think about composition.
The influence was especially important because O'Keeffe had become dissatisfied with conventional academic painting. After working as an art teacher in Texas and South Carolina, she began making abstract charcoal drawings that reduced forms to expressive lines and shapes.
William Merritt Chase was an earlier teacher at the Art Students League, not the Columbia instructor most associated with this turning point. Dow therefore occupies a distinct place in O'Keeffe's development toward American modernism.