Lucien Smith, Onetime Market Darling Who Turned His Focus To Helping Emerging Artists, Has Died at 37

Lucien Smith, a onetime market darling who more recently focused on supporting emerging artists, has died at 37, the news was confirmed to ARTnews by dealer Bill Powers, who had showed Smith early on. No information has been released about the cause or place of his death.

“Lucien lives in a wordless place inside us now,” Powers told ARTnews.

“I loved him and I’m hapy knowing he found some serenity later in life,” artist Joel Mesler told ARTnews via text, adding a heart emoji.

“Lucien Smith was our friend and his death is tragic,” artist Andrew Kuo wrote on X. “This is a loss for our community. Damn. Rest in peace, Lucien.”

Born in 1989, Smith earned a BFA at New York’s Cooper Union in 2011. Around this time, New York art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn helped propel Smith to art-world fame when she began showing him after seeing his work at his thesis exhibition. According to the artist’s website, “Following what seemed like overnight success Smith battled with some of the pitfalls of gaining notoriety so early.” 

Smith had his first solo gallery show, “Good Vibrations,” at Bill Powers’s Half Gallery in 2012. “It was all appropriated guitar bodies which Lucien had then turned into wall sculpture by either painting or adorning them with bottle caps, glitter, tin foil, etc.,” Powers wrote for Office in 2018. “Think John Armleder meets junkyard Duchamp.”

“He’s just 24, but Lucien Smith has arrived,” opened a New York Times T Magazine profile in 2013, citing his Half Gallery show along with exposure at OHWOW, Brand New, and Susanne Geiss Company. Smith was included in the 2013 and 2014 Forbes “30 Under 30” lists. He quickly became famous for his “Rain” paintings, created by spraying canvases with a fire extinguisher.

Smith gained yet more notoriety when his work appeared in artist-critic Walter Robinson’s 2014 Artspace essay “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” alongside artist Jacob Kassay. Their work, wrote Robinson, involved “a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting” that “brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella’s ‘black paintings,’ among other things.”

That kind of work was also gaining traction on the market. One of Smith’s “Rain” paintings had recently fetched $372,000 at Sotheby’s London. His auction record remains $389,000, achieved when Hobbes, the Rain Man, And My Friend Barney / Under the Sycamore Tree (2011) sold at Phillips New York in 2013.

A troubled family background emerged in a TedX talk Smith delivered at Columbia College in 2014, claiming that he caught his father, Terrence Sanders-Smith, cheating on his mother, fashion designer Melissa Dizon Ramsey. Smith called this experience “traumatic,” adding that this created a fear of failing that had lasted for his entire career. His father penned an acidic reply in a blog post, going so far as to call his son a “coward.”

By September 2014, having bought a house in Montauk, on New York’s Long Island, Smith stopped showing his art, telling the Observer, “I really want to stay out of the art world right now.” As soon as 2015, the New York Times would report that “this volatile sector of the market, where insiders continually scour Facebook and Instagram for the next Damien Hirst, has undergone a correction.”

Smith would then look to how he could assist other artists. In 2015, he created the nonprofit Serving the People (STP), conceived as an online registry for unsigned painters and photographers. “It’s a group which seeks to nourish emerging talent in art, music and film,” Smith told Powers in the Office interview. “Our goal is to provide an alternative platform for creative inquiry and experimentation. We want to help bring awareness to the unrefined, uncommercial and create a market for it as well.”

Smith would have his first museum solo exhibition, “Southampton Suite,” in 2020 at the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, New York. In Interview magazine, he called the show “a therapeutic experience” and talked about STP as aiming to address some of the problems he experienced in the art market, including the plight of small galleries in a landscape dominated by mega-galleries, adding that the organization was putting together film festivals and planning to get into music releases.

Smith also made a foray into NFTs in 2021, at a moment when digital art was commanding huge attention, becoming director of the Cultural Innovation Lab at equity management firm Lobus. He dropped his first NFT collection, “Seeds,” through Lobus that year.

The ever-restless artist made headlines again in 2024, when he reopened Food, a downtown New York restaurant created in 1971 by artists Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark, with whose estate Smith collaborated on the project. The hope, Smith told the Art Newspaper, was to support artists through work opportunities and host events to “enhance some of the artistic engagement downtown.”

“For creatives, many work opportunities can feel like distractions from their practice,” Smith told the newspaper. “I believe that if you put time and energy into young creatives, that in turn will create a much healthier ecosystem.”

Just last month, according to Artnet News, Smith was making paintings with a modified industrial airbrush, recalling the fire extinguisher he used to make his earliest works. They were to go on view at Tripoli Gallery, in Wainscott, New York.

“Life has taken me full circle,” Smith told Artnet. “I think it is time to return to the process I was given.”