Who was Georgia O'Keeffe's teacher whose ideas helped lead her toward abstraction?

Arthur Wesley Dow was the teacher whose ideas helped lead Georgia O'Keeffe toward abstraction.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow's approach while studying at the University of Virginia summer school in 1912. His teaching emphasized the organized use of line, color, and tone rather than treating art as a straightforward copy of nature. Those principles gave O'Keeffe a way to develop images from personal perception and formal relationships.

Dow was an influential American educator, printmaker, and art theorist. His book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure became an important teaching text. O'Keeffe later said that Dow's ideas helped her express herself through design rather than simply reproduce what she saw.

Dow should not be confused with Robert Henri, who taught O'Keeffe at the Art Students League. Henri represented a different stage of her education, while Dow's ideas were especially important in her transition toward experimentation and abstraction.