Artist Lucien Smith, Fixture of NYC’s Downtown Scene, Dies at 37
Following early market success and what he called “the pitfalls of gaining notoriety so early,” Smith shifted his focus to community-centered projects.
Artist Lucien Smith, an abstract painter whose work as a nonprofit founder and restaurateur channeled the community ethos of 1970s New York, has died at the age of 37. The news of his passing was confirmed by Erin Goldberger, director of Half Gallery, which showed the artist's work early on. The cause of death has not been made public.
Smith was best known for his Rain Paintings series (2011–12), which he began making the year he graduated from Cooper Union by spraying canvases with acrylic paint loaded into fire extinguishers. Later subject to the rapid cycle of market growth and decline that defined the early-2010s movement reviving mid-20th-century abstraction and formalism, Smith quit commercial galleries in 2015 and began advocating for himself and others.
“I remember Lucien wanted to do a video of himself dressed as a ghoul in a tuxedo walking through Times Square as a joke about being the face of ‘Zombie Formalism,’” Bill Powers, art dealer and Half Gallery owner, told Hyperallergic. “He had a sense of humor about his place in the world. He will be missed terribly.”
Born in 1989 in Los Angeles, Smith was raised in the Lower East Side until his teenage years, when his mother, a fashion designer, and father, an artist and musician, moved him back to Los Angeles. Upon graduating high school, he returned to New York to study at Cooper Union, where he would develop the aesthetic language that would result in his two-person 2011 thesis show, Imagined Nostalgia, and his near-immediate market success upon graduation. “Hobbes, The Rain Man, and My Friend Barney / Under the Sycamore Tree,” a painting originally purchased for $10,000 from the thesis show, was sold at auction at Phillips for $389,000 in 2013.
Two years later, collector Alberto Mugrabi alleged that the work was practically unsellable, attesting to the market fluctuations that Smith openly acknowledged, stating on his website that he “battled with some of the pitfalls of gaining notoriety so early.”
