{"id":2134872,"date":"2026-09-08T16:09:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T13:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2134872"},"modified":"2026-09-08T16:09:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T13:09:55","slug":"lucien-smith-market-darling-who-focused-on-helping-artists-has-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2134872","title":{"rendered":"Lucien Smith, Market Darling Who Focused On Helping Artists, Has Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Lucien-Smith-attends-Guillermo-Del-Toros-_Pinocchio_-New-York-Premiere-at-Museum-of-Modern-Art-on-December-06-2022-in-New-York-City.Photo-by-Jamie-McCarthy_WireImage.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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

\n\t\u201cLucien lives in a wordless place inside us now,\u201d Powers told ARTnews<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI loved him and I\u2019m happy knowing he found some serenity later in life,\u201d artist Joel Mesler told ARTnews <\/em>via text, adding a heart emoji.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLucien Smith was our friend and his death is tragic,\u201d artist Andrew Kuo wrote on X. \u201cThis is a loss for our community. Damn. Rest in peace, Lucien.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen we met Lucien right after he graduated, in 2011, he was the hub and heart of a burgeoning downtown culture,\u201d said New York dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who gave the artist early exposure at her gallery Salon 94, in an email to ARTnews<\/em>. \u201cBright, tender, filled with ideas and experimentation \u2014 a rare artist with charisma, talent, and the ability to build community. \u00a0His Rain paintings\u2014made with a fire extinguisher standing in for a rain machine, Lucien himself directing the spray\u2014are now iconic. He made a batch in my backyard. As well, his Pie paintings, his Seeds, his Ark paintings and Scrap Metal. \u00a0His most recent masterpiece was FOOD\u2014together we worked with Max Lamb to build his banquets. We are deeply saddened, and will miss him terribly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn in 1989, Smith earned a BFA at New York\u2019s Cooper Union in 2011. Around this time, 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\u2019s website, \u201cFollowing what seemed like overnight success Smith battled with some of the pitfalls of gaining notoriety so early.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSmith had his first solo gallery show, \u201cGood Vibrations,\u201d at Bill Powers\u2019s Half Gallery in 2012. \u201cIt 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.,\u201d Powers wrote for Office<\/em> in 2018. \u201cThink John Armleder meets junkyard Duchamp.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe\u2019s just 24, but Lucien Smith has arrived,\u201d opened a New York Times T Magazine <\/em>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 <\/em>\u201c30 Under 30\u201d lists. He quickly became famous for his \u201cRain\u201d paintings, created by spraying canvases with a fire extinguisher.<\/p>\n

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Lucien Smith, Blazing Saddles<\/em>, acrylic on unprimed canvas, 2012. <\/span>Courtesy Phillips<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tSmith gained yet more notoriety when his work appeared in artist-critic Walter Robinson\u2019s 2014 Artspace<\/em>essay \u201cFlipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,\u201d alongside artist Jacob Kassay. Their work, wrote Robinson, involved \u201ca straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting\u201d that \u201cbrings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella\u2019s \u2018black paintings,\u2019 among other things.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThat kind of work was also gaining traction on the market. One of Smith\u2019s \u201cRain\u201d paintings had recently fetched $372,000 at Sotheby\u2019s London. His auction record remains $389,000, achieved when Hobbes, the Rain Man, And My Friend Barney \/ Under the Sycamore Tree<\/em> (2011) sold at Phillips New York in 2013.<\/p>\n

\n\tA 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 \u201ctraumatic,\u201d 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 \u201ccoward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBy September 2014, having bought a house in Montauk, on New York\u2019s Long Island, Smith stopped showing his art, telling the Observer<\/em>, \u201cI really want to stay out of the art world right now.\u201d As soon as 2015, the New York Times<\/em>would report that \u201cthis volatile sector of the market, where insiders continually scour Facebook and Instagram for the next Damien Hirst, has undergone a correction.\u201d<\/p>\n

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View of Lucien Smith\u2019s exhibition \u201cA Clean Sweep,\u201d 2013.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Courtesy Suzanne Geiss<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tSmith 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. \u201cIt\u2019s a group which seeks to nourish emerging talent in art, music and film,\u201d Smith told Powers in the Office<\/em> interview. \u201cOur 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSmith would have his first museum solo exhibition, \u201cSouthampton Suite,\u201d in 2020 at the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, New York. In Interview <\/em>magazine, he called the show \u201ca therapeutic experience\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tSmith 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, \u201cSeeds,\u201d through Lobus that year.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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<\/em>, was to support artists through work opportunities and host events to \u201cenhance some of the artistic engagement downtown.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor creatives, many work opportunities can feel like distractions from their practice,\u201d Smith told the newspaper. \u201cI believe that if you put time and energy into young creatives, that in turn will create a much healthier ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJust last month, according to Artnet News<\/em>, 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. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLife has taken me full circle,\u201d Smith told Artnet<\/em>. \u201cI think it is time to return to the process I was given.\u201d<\/p>\n

UDPATE, September 8, 1:25 p.m.<\/strong>: This article was updated to include a statement from Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/lucien-smith-market-darling-helping-emerging-artists-died-1234797497\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Lucien-Smith-attends-Guillermo-Del-Toros-_Pinocchio_-New-York-Premiere-at-Museum-of-Modern-Art-on-December-06-2022-in-New-York-City.Photo-by-Jamie-McCarthy_WireImage.jpg?w=1024″] 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. \u201cLucien lives in a wordless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2134872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2134872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2134872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2134872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2134872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}