Alon Bement was Georgia O'Keeffe's first major art teacher at the University of Virginia.
O'Keeffe taught art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville during the summers of 1912 and 1914. There she worked under Alon Bement, who was associated with the progressive educational ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Bement encouraged approaches based on design, line, and color rather than simple imitation of nature.
This experience helped redirect O'Keeffe's artistic thinking. She had already received conventional academic training, but Bement's teaching introduced her to a more modern idea: an artwork could be organized around expressive formal elements instead of reproducing an object exactly.
Arthur Wesley Dow became especially important later, when O'Keeffe studied directly with him at Columbia University Teachers College. Bement and Dow are therefore easy to mix up, but Bement was the teacher connected with her first University of Virginia summer sessions.