Alon Bement taught Georgia O'Keeffe at the University of Virginia and encouraged her abstract experiments.
O'Keeffe worked as an art teacher and attended summer sessions at the University of Virginia in the 1910s. There she studied with Alon Bement, whose teaching emphasized new approaches to design and composition rather than simply copying traditional subjects. His ideas helped her reconsider how color, line, and shape could communicate independently.
O'Keeffe's relationship with modernist education continued through Arthur Wesley Dow, whom she studied with at Columbia University Teachers College. Dow's influence is especially associated with her move toward simplified forms and abstraction. William Merritt Chase, by contrast, taught O'Keeffe earlier at the Art Students League. These instructors all belong to different stages of her training, which can make their roles easy to confuse.