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How did David Smith begin to use metal as his medium? What were his sources of inspiration? (site 1)

Answer 1

David Smith moved from painting into working directly in metal in the 1930s by teaching himself welding and assembling found and industrial scraps into three‑dimensional forms. He was inspired both by modern European art (especially Cubism and artists like Picasso and Brancusi and the Constructivists) and by the physical world of machinery and scrap — the shapes, textures and structural possibilities of steel, automobile and farm parts — bringing a painter’s sense of line and plane to welded metal.