Lucien Smith, a genre-blurring artist noted for his swashbuckling sensibility and skateboarder cool, who found overnight fame — and encountered a sharp backlash — after his early work fetched eye-popping prices at auction when he was barely out of art school, has died. He was 37.
His death was confirmed by his friend Bill Powers, the owner of Half Gallery in Manhattan, where Mr. Smith held his first solo exhibition in New York in 2012. No other details were provided.
Mr. Smith was only 24 when his 2011 painting “Hobbes, The Rain Man, and My Friend Barney/Under the Sycamore Tree,” a serene landscape adapted from an animated Disney Winnie the Pooh film, sold at a Phillips auction for $389,000; it was first featured in his senior thesis show at Cooper Union’s school of art in New York.
In 2014, “Two Sides Of The Same Coin,” one of his Rain series of paintings consisting of canvases sprayed with paint from fire extinguishers, calling to mind raindrops, sold for about $370,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in London.
“He’s just 24, but Lucien Smith has arrived,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, had written in 2013.
That same year, the Style section of The Times called him a “wunderkind artist who, in the span of several solo shows, has gone from filling scrappy galleries with broom ready-mades to creating monumental oil paintings for blue-chip galleries and bigwig collectors like Aaron Bondaroff and David Zwirner.” The article noted that Mr. Smith was dating Mr. Zwirner’s daughter Marlene.
Around that time, Mr. Smith was riding high on his solo show “A Clean Sweep” at the Suzanne Geiss Company.
This nostalgia-tinged exploration of the transformation of New York City during the Giuliani years featured a collection of free-standing brooms scavenged from city streets, crumpled newspapers affixed to canvas and imagery of other city artifacts. He made a corresponding short film in collaboration with the journalist and art-world fixture Glenn O’Brien.
“It’s very much supposed to be a love letter,” Mr. Smith said of the film, featuring music from Miles Davis’s haunting “Kind of Blue” as the soundtrack, in his interview with T. “It was really about trying to trick the viewer — and myself — into reminiscing about something that’s right in front of you and gaining an appreciation for the present day.”
Mr. Smith was featured in Forbes annual “30 Under 30” survey of rising notables in various fields in both 2013 and 2014.
Known for his mischievous streak, “Smith makes canvases with layered oil paint and detritus like newspaper and aluminum pie plates,” Forbes wrote. “One painting shows a hazy seascape. Another piece: silk screens of indexes from biology textbooks, covered in Plexiglass.”
Mr. Smith was well cast as an art-world phenom of the 2010s. A product of Los Angeles and downtown Manhattan and a skateboarder and avid surfer, the rebel-chic artist, who was of Asian and Black descent, modeled for the achingly cool streetwear label Supreme.
In 2018, his fellow wunderkind, the fashion designer Virgil Abloh, hosted an exhibit of Mr. Smith’s work at his EM PTY Gallery featuring T-shirts emblazoned with his paintings that sold for $350.
Even so, “being called an ‘art-world darling’ might not be what Smith has been aiming for,” Vanity Fair wrote in a 2014 profile. “I took the thing I loved to do and I made it into what I do for a living. And that’s a really tricky thing. It’s perverse, and it becomes conflicting, because the thing that you used to use to escape reality is now just your reality.”
“Every month,” Mr. Smith told Vanity Fair, “there’s another 12” shows. “You’re going and going and going — and what is it? Is it another ritual now that we go to see art, pass judgment, and commoditize the artwork? Or are we actually learning something?”
By that point, he had reason to have soured of the spotlight. In 2014, the art critic Walter Robinson flamed Mr. Smith and other young artists in an incendiary essay for Artspace titled “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism.”
Mr. Robinson argued that a new generation of artists were creating flashy if uninspiring reanimations of midcentury abstraction that functioned equally as interior decoration and as a commodity for collectors looking to buy and flip works by the latest buzzy art stars.
“These artworks,” a 2018 Artnet summary of the trend recalled, “which appealed to those with a little art education just as much as they drew eye rolls from connoisseurs, arose at the precise moment that the global economy witnessed a level of wealth disparity and private-sector advantages unseen since the Gilded Age.”
The wave of speculation slowed, and prices began to tumble. In 2017, another, smaller Rain painting, “Untitled (rain test),” sold at Christie’s for only $12,500.
“I had sort of lost belief in myself and what I was making,” Mr. Smith said in a 2020 interview with the culture magazine Office. “So I had a little bit of a breakdown, a meltdown, I wanted to self-destruct because I wanted to destroy the thing that I built, as this sort of facade and dive into some identity crisis and to figure out like who I was so that I could come back in a moment like this and be much stronger in my foundation and be able to handle criticism.”
Lucien Marc Smith was born on April 15, 1989, in Los Angeles. His father, Terrence Sanders, was an artist; his mother, Vivien Ramsay, was a fashion designer for Todd Oldham, Theory and other labels.
After graduating from Santa Monica High School in 2007, he headed to New York to attend Cooper Union. There, the well-connected gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn became an early patron.
“I didn’t really come from money,” he told The Times’ Style section. “So I wanted my thesis show to grab as much attention as possible. Jeanne, she bought one of the first paintings I showed.”
But by 2015, he had already abandoned the New York gallery frenzy for a home in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island’s South Fork, where, as he said in another interview with T magazine, he planned to track storm patterns to inspire future paintings, play the drums and cleanse his psyche. “I really want to stay out of the art world right now,” he said in another interview.
“Most artists spend their whole lives, you know, maturing during their work and maturing themselves and then get to a point of recognition,” he told Office. “I didn’t. I wasn’t able to have any of that. I wasn’t ever able to sit with work and decide if I liked it or not.”
As Mr. Powers said: “Becoming famous in your early 20s in the art world is almost like being a child actor. We watched you grow up in front of us. And take your lumps, too.”
In 2017 he started Serving the People, a nonprofit organization to provide community and support for emerging artists.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
Last year, to much fanfare, Mr. Smith and the chef Mathieu Canet opened a Chinatown revival of FOOD, the storied art-hub restaurant founded by the artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard in SoHo in the early 1970s.
Shortly before his death, the site Eater reported that the restaurant’s Instagram account now said that it was closed until further notice.
In an interview about the venture last year with the site Grub Street, Mr. Smith mused about celebrated artists whose careers his might have resembled if it had not run aground so early — Rashid Johnson, Jeff Koons, Cecily Brown.
“Maybe everything is derivative, you know?” he said. “Maybe we’re all just living the lives of other people.”
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