Lucien Smith, a painter who funneled his early commercial success into a Chinatown restaurant and nonprofit supporting emerging artists, has died at the age of 37. His passing was confirmed by several people close to the artist. Information about the cause of death was not immediately available.
Smith was born in Los Angeles in 1989 and burst onto the New York art scene as a young Cooper Union grad in his early 20s with abstract “Rain Paintings” he created by spraying paint-filled fire extinguishers across the surface of the canvas. The dappled effect was reminiscent of rainfall and struck a chord with collectors eager for dynamic but easy-on-the-eyes painting.
The artist became a key figure in an unofficial movement dubbed “Zombie Formalism,” coined by the late critic Walter Robinson to describe a devil-may-care brand of abstraction that was more interested in the inventive, stunt-filled process than the final outcome.
“When we met Lucien right after he graduated, in 2011, he was the hub and heart of a burgeoning downtown culture,” says Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who bought Smith’s work from his senior thesis show and showed him early on. “Bright, tender, filled with ideas and experimentation—a rare artist with charisma, talent, and the ability to build community.” She recalled that he made a batch of “Rain” paintings in her backyard.
Smith’s profile as an artist rose rapidly—alongside his prices. In 2014, a surreal landscape he painted from Winnie the Pooh as part of his senior thesis at Cooper Union sold for $389,000 at auction—over 38 times its price just three years earlier. The spotlight took a toll. He spoke about his struggles with relationships and substance abuse. “It’s perverse, and it becomes conflicting, because the thing that you used to use to escape reality is now just your reality,” Smith told Vanity Fair in 2014.
In just a few years, Smith went from “wunderkind”—as multiple headlines described him in the early 2010s—to a symbol of the art market’s fickleness. Speculators who had only recently fought over his work at auction decided they were ready to move on. Even his record-setting Winnie the Pooh painting reportedly became impossible to resell.
Burned by the commercial market, Smith took a step back from the art world and stopped working directly with galleries in 2015. He took a break from painting to pursue photography, resolving to capture extreme weather events.
“I was producing work like a madman—I wanted to be this ‘superartist,’” he told The New York Times. “I saw artists going down that road, and I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to find a more honest approach to making art.” He bought a place in Montauk—where he invited his mother, with whom he would launch a fashion brand, Vivien Ramsay, in 2021, and younger brother to live—and spent time playing drums and DJing.
Over the next few years, Smith developed what would become a broader mission in his final decade: helping young artists build their careers sustainably and avoid repeating his own roller coaster experience. In 2016, he founded Serving the People, a nonprofit originally conceived as a platform for unsigned artists that grew into a community workshop. He also experimented with NFTs and advocated for the wider implementation of resale royalties, which enable visual artists to benefit financially when their works appreciate on the secondary market.
“I admire that he was always seeking community, and trying to create hubs for people,” says the art dealer Bill Powers, who showed the artist’s work several times over the course of his career. “He was always seeking connection and I think that was maybe a survival mechanism for him.”
Despite his uneasy relationship with the mainstream art world, Smith never went too long without making or showing art. He had a solo show every few years and continued to try out new approaches to painting and other media. He painted diptychs of stars built on color theory, scrap metal sculptures, and paintings of seed packets purchased at hardware stores. In 2020, the Parrish Art Museum in Long Island presented his first solo institutional exhibition.
In search of more ways to forge an artistic community, Smith began a new chapter as a restaurateur in 2025. He opened FOOD, named after the legendary artist restaurant established by Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard, and Gordon Matta-Clark in the 1970s. The two storefronts shared an anti-establishment, freewheeling attitude and an interest in creating an affordable, accessible space for artists to gather. “I’d love for FOOD to be a kind of slapstick, hilarious melting pot where people can create memories, good or bad,” Lucien Smith told CULTURED in 2024.
Smith insisted on FOOD’s positioning as living art—a piece that melded his interests in platforming young creatives and bucking industry norms. “I am making art,” Smith said. “It just happens to look and feel like a restaurant.” Artists would go on to staff the joint, serving up steak alongside sundaes with gummy worms and after-hours DJ sets. There were early reports of turbulence behind the scenes, with reports of staff turnover, payment delays, and safety concerns. The restaurant is now listed on Instagram as closed until further notice.
Recently, Smith had begun returning to the visual language that made him famous over a decade ago. In August, he spent one night airbrushing four canvases, in the style of his earlier “Rain Paintings” series, at Camp Hero in Montauk. “A process like this is a gift,” Smith said in a statement from his studio. “I let the market and outside criticism dictate my practice, and that was a mistake. Life has taken me full circle. I think it is time to return to the process I was given.” The artist was working with Tripoli gallery founder Tripoli Patterson, who was scheduled to show the resulting series of works, “Delay of Game,” this month but has put the exhibition on hold until further notice. “I will keep pushing forward with the trust he gave me to show this final gesture of his lifelong work,” the gallerist told CULTURED.
“People do [Lucien] a disservice when they pigeonhole him as a Zombie Formalist—his practice in certain series went beyond what he was known for. I see him as an extension of Pop art and the Pictures Generation,” Powers told CULTURED. “Hopefully over time there will be some excavation into his work and that people might appreciate him more fully.”
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Everything You Need to Have On Your Cultural Calendar for Fall 2026
How Cow’s Milk and Missing Checks Brought Down Brooklyn’s Burgeoning Vegan Empire
Which Film Has the Best Fashion of All Time? We Asked Our Editors to Weigh In.
America’s College Dream Is Dying. Why Is the Campus Novel More Tempting Than Ever?
What Does It Really Cost to Be an Artist in New York? Here Are the Numbers.
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
