Lucien Smith, Painter Who Defined New York's 2010s Art Boom, Dies at 37
Painter Lucien Smith, whose fire-extinguisher "Rain Paintings" made him one of the most talked-about young artists of New York's early-2010s art boom, died on Monday, September 7, in New York. He was 37. A cause of death was not immediately known, according to Artnet News, which first reported his death on September 8. Artnet News
Smith was born in Los Angeles in 1989 and raised in New York. He graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art — the prestigious Manhattan art school — with a BFA in 2011. His thesis show, "Imagined Nostalgia," included a large painting of the tree from Winnie-the-Pooh, a motif that caught the eye of dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who began showing his work at her gallery, Salon 94, shortly after.
The breakthrough came fast. In 2011, while living at the upstate New York compound of film director James Ivory, Smith began making the works that would define his career: the Rain Paintings. He sprayed thinned paint across unprimed canvas from a fire extinguisher, a technique he said he picked up from watching graffiti artists. The result was loose, all-over compositions — the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, later described them as "process-based works that employ both accidental and improvisational marks." Parrish Art Museum
His first solo show, "Needle in the Hay," opened in October 2011 at Ritter/Zamet in London — named after an Elliott Smith song and built around themes of youth, anger, and lost innocence. The following year brought "Seven Rain Paintings" at OHWOW in Los Angeles and "Good Vibrations" at Bill Powers's Half Gallery in New York. Solo shows at Salon 94 and Skarstedt Gallery followed.
Then the auction market caught fire. In November 2013, a work from Smith's graduate show that had sold for US$10,000 at his thesis exhibition fetched US$389,000 at Phillips — the auction house on Park Avenue — setting a new auction record for the artist, who was 24 at the time. His work brought in more than US$4 million at auction in 2014 alone, according to the Artnet Price Database. The Rain Paintings routinely eclipsed their estimates. By the spring of 2014, the New York Times had deemed him a "wunderkind."
The final 10 large-scale Rain Paintings, later known as the Southampton Suite, were made in the summer of 2013 in an open-air studio in Greenberg Rohatyn's backyard — a last chapter for the series that had carried Smith from art school to the top of the auction lists.
Multiple outlets confirmed his death on September 8, including ARTnews, Hyperallergic, and CULTURED magazine. ARTnews; Hyperallergic; CULTURED ARTnews noted that people who had known Smith over many years emphasised his later focus on helping emerging artists, while Hyperallergic pointed to "the pitfalls of gaining" early fame.
Skarstedt Gallery, which represented Smith during his auction-market years, issued a statement expressing condolences. Greenberg Rohatyn, in a statement shared with Artnet News, described Smith as "the hub and heart of a burgeoning downtown culture."
