Which teacher's ideas about composition strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe at Columbia University?

Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas about composition strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe at Columbia University.

O'Keeffe encountered Dow's teaching through Alon Bement, who taught at the University of Virginia and later at Columbia's Teachers College. She studied with Bement in 1913 and then with Dow in New York. Dow encouraged students to organize line, color, and tonal relationships rather than simply copy what they saw.

This approach gave O'Keeffe a framework for developing nonrepresentational art. Her charcoal abstractions of 1915, made while she was teaching in South Carolina, grew from this shift away from academic realism. They became some of the earliest wholly abstract works produced by an American artist.

Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase were also important teachers in O'Keeffe's broader education, but they are not the answer to this specific question. Dow's compositional principles were the crucial influence associated with her move toward abstraction.