Who taught Georgia O'Keeffe the design principles that helped lead her toward abstraction?

Arthur Wesley Dow taught Georgia O'Keeffe design principles that helped lead her toward abstraction.

O'Keeffe encountered Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas while studying at the University of Virginia's summer school in 1912. Dow emphasized composition, line, color, and balance rather than requiring art to imitate visible reality. His approach offered O'Keeffe a way to think about artistic structure and personal expression.

Dow himself taught at Columbia University Teachers College and influenced generations of American artists and art teachers. O'Keeffe later described his ideas as a major turning point because they helped her move away from the academic realism she had learned earlier.

William Merritt Chase was also important in O'Keeffe's education, but he taught her at the Art Students League in New York before Dow's influence redirected her thinking. O'Keeffe's later abstract charcoal drawings, made in the mid-1910s, developed from this shift rather than from a single European model.