Renowned today for his large metal sculptures, David Smith dropped out of the University of Notre Dame to become an automotive welder and riveter in the mid-1920s. In 1927 he joined the Art Students League in New York, where he first encountered the work of Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivists. There he also became friends with Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jan Matulka, and Jackson Pollock, all pioneering practitioners of abstraction in the United States.