Arthur Wesley Dow taught Georgia O'Keeffe at Columbia University Teachers College and influenced her move toward abstraction.
Dow was an influential American artist and educator whose teaching emphasized composition, line, color, and design rather than simply copying what the eye saw. O'Keeffe studied with him in New York in the early 1910s, and his ideas helped her reconsider the purpose of art.
His approach was important because it encouraged students to organize visual elements expressively. This gave O'Keeffe a framework for making drawings and paintings that did not depend on literal representation.
O'Keeffe is sometimes linked chiefly with Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited and promoted her work. Stieglitz was crucial to her public career, but Dow was the teacher whose artistic principles helped open the way to her early abstractions.