Which teacher's ideas strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's early abstract art?

Arthur Wesley Dow's ideas strongly influenced Georgia O'Keeffe's early abstract art.

Dow taught that composition could be built from line, color, and tone rather than from literal representation alone. O'Keeffe encountered his principles through Alon Bement, one of Dow's former students, while teaching art in Virginia. She later studied directly with Dow at Columbia University Teachers College in New York.

These ideas helped O'Keeffe move away from the academic realism she had learned in art school. Her charcoal abstractions of 1915 became an important turning point, using simplified forms to express sensations and ideas. Alfred Stieglitz's 1916 exhibition of these drawings helped bring this new direction to public attention.