Lucien Smith, a mainstay of the downtown New York art scene, has died at 37. The artist’s meteoric early success made him a defining, divisive figure of New York’s early-2010s art boom. He passed away on Monday, September 7th, in New York.
A cause of death has not been made public. Half Gallery, which represents the artist, confirmed the news. “When we met Lucien right after he graduated, in 2011, he was the hub and heart of a burgeoning downtown culture,” dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who gave Smith his start at her gallery, Salon 94, told Artnet. “Bright, tender, filled with ideas and experimentation, a rare artist with charisma, talent, and the ability to build community.”
Smith was born on April 15, 1989, in Los Angeles, to a fashion-designer mother and an artist-musician father, according to Artforum. He spent a peripatetic childhood attending more than a dozen schools before graduating from Santa Monica High in 2007 and enrolling at Cooper Union. “I felt like I had gotten the golden ticket,” he later told The East Hampton Star. His 2011 thesis show, “Imagined Nostalgia,” included a large painting of the tree from Winnie the Pooh and other, in his words, “objects from a childhood that I never experienced firsthand.” The show caught Greenberg Rohatyn’s eye, and she exhibited him almost immediately.
That same year, while staying at film director James Ivory’s upstate compound, Smith began his Rain Paintings, spraying thinned paint across unprimed canvas from a fire extinguisher, a technique he said he adapted from watching graffiti artists. The series debuted that October at the solo show “Needle in the Hay” at Ritter/Zamet in London, followed in 2012 by “Seven Rain Paintings” at OHWOW in Los Angeles. His New York solo debut, “Good Vibrations” at Bill Powers’s Half Gallery, showcased guitar bodies adorned with bottle caps and glitter. “Think John Armleder meets junkyard Duchamp,” Powers said to Artnet. The works sold to collectors including Richard Prince, Rashid Johnson, and Vito Schnabel.
The Rain Paintings made Smith a well-known name. He completed the series’final 10 canvases, later called the Southampton Suite, in the summer of 2013, working in a studio he built in Greenberg Rohatyn’s backyard. That November, a painting from his thesis show that had sold for $10,000 resold at Phillips for $389,000, a new auction record set when Smith was just 24. Solo shows at Salon 94 and Skarstedt Gallery followed, and his work sold for more than $4 million at auction in 2014 alone, per the Artnet Price Database.
That fame carried a cost. In 2014, critic Walter Robinson grouped Smith with Oscar Murillo and Jacob Kassay under the label “Zombie Formalism,” describing young abstractionists whose paintings collectors bought to flip rather than keep. Smith had a sense of humor about it. But the pressure to create was real. “I’d sell out of work before I could sign it,” he said.
By 2015, the market had turned. Smith’s resale values fell sharply from their six-figure peaks, and he stepped back from galleries and moved to Montauk. “Art was about money everywhere I looked. It was scary,” he told Hypebeast. He was candid about longtime struggles with substances, too: “I’m a chronic relapser,” he told Kenny Schachter in 2021. “I shouldn’t drink or do drugs.” That year he founded Serving the People, a nonprofit registry for unsigned artists, aiming, as he put it, “to help bring awareness to the unrefined, uncommercial” work overlooked by the market.
Smith’s first solo museum show, “Southampton Suite,” opened at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill in 2020, built around the final Rain Paintings; he called the experience “therapeutic” in Interview magazine. In 2021, he moved into NFTs as director of the Cultural Innovation Lab at the asset platform Lobus, releasing a collection called “Seeds.” In 2024, he reopened FOOD, the artist-run restaurant Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard had founded in SoHo in 1971, working with Matta-Clark’s estate and designer Max Lamb on its banquettes.
This year, Smith returned decisively to painting. In June, he opened “Burn Down the House” at Kearsey & Gold in London. The show featured airbrushed paintings of Dorothy’s house from The Wizard of Oz falling from the sky. Gallery director Lucas Kearsey wrote that Smith was too often “mistakenly spoken about as if he is a figment of recent memory.” Last month, he made four new Rain Paintings on an abandoned baseball field at Camp Hero in Montauk, with Julian Schnabel among those looking on, ahead of a Tripoli Gallery show in Wainscott, New York. It was slated to open this week. “I let the market and outside criticism dictate my practice, and that was a mistake,” Smith said in the release announcing the work. “Life has taken me full circle.”
A childlike streak ran through Smith’s subjects, from the Pooh tree to pie fights to Dorothy’s falling house. His art world references were specific, including Schnabel, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, and Hokusai. “Whatever that generation is after Dash Snow, Lucien will forever be the face of it,” Powers said. On X, artist Andrew Kuo called his death “a loss for our community,” while artist Joel Mesler wrote that he was “happy knowing he found some serenity later in life.”