The art world was shocked by word that the artist Lucien Smith, who moved from New York City to Montauk in 2015, died this month at age 37.
Details as to the place and cause of death were not immediately available, The New York Times and ARTnews reporting only that Smith’s death was confirmed by a friend, Bill Powers, an art dealer. Several published reports listed the date of his death as Sept. 7.
The artist was planning a show of new paintings made last month on a baseball field at Camp Hero in Montauk, to be called “Delay of Game” and exhibited at the Tripoli Gallery in Wainscott. The gallery will be open for the public to view the works on Sunday from 4 to 8 p.m. They will not be available for sale, said Tripoli Patterson, the gallery’s founder.
“The title is a baseball term,” states a press release Smith wrote for the exhibition. “Rain is the one condition under which play cannot continue. The game stops and the grounds crew pulls the tarp across the infield.”
Of the “Delay of Game” paintings, he wrote that a tarp would be on the Camp Hero field to protect the ground.
“In baseball it keeps the rain off. Here it catches the paint that falls.”
The site, he wrote, “carries its own suspension. The field sits inside a decommissioned military installation at the eastern end of Long Island, built for a war that never arrived.”
As though in a rain delay, “He had stepped away from painting and from the art world,” Patterson said on Sunday. “I feel like he had not been treated fairly in the art world. People were valuing the profit of his work rather than him as a human being.”
“He was always a step ahead of everybody else,” Patterson said. “He had this concept of coming back to these ‘Rain’ paintings. It was so exciting when he presented this idea to me. I was so honored to be given this opportunity of working with him.”
Smith had attained success early. Just four years after being accepted into Cooper Union’s B.F.A. program, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the owner of Salon 94, a Manhattan gallery, bought a painting from his senior thesis show, according to a 2021 profile in The Star. The painting, “which recreates a scene from an animated Winnie-the-Pooh film into a leaf-strewn landscape, sold at auction two years later for $389,000,” Mark Segal wrote.
In 2011, the year he graduated from Cooper Union, Smith began creating the “Rain” paintings while living upstate. In 2013, he made “Southampton Suite,” a set of 10 works painted in a self-built plein-air studio in the garden of Greenberg Rohatyn’s Southampton residence and making up his first solo museum exhibition, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill in 2020. These were made by spraying large canvases with a paint-filled fire extinguisher.
Still in his mid-20s, Smith decamped to Montauk. At that point in his career, “I was just a little bit taken aback by a lot of the things that were happening so fast for me,” he told Alicia Longwell, then chief curator at the Parrish, on a 2020 podcast. “It was a lot for me to deal with.”
“I focus so much on my work and what I’m doing,” he told Longwell, “and I find that being in Montauk really helps me have that serenity and that space from the world to do that, but at the same time my social life and the things which I’m learning are equally as important are being neglected. It’s a bit of a balance that I’m trying to find.”
“I think he got burned out by the commercial art world in the city and decided to move here, where he found peace,” Corinne Erni, chief curator of art and education at the Parrish, told The Star. “He really loved it here.”
Smith “was incredibly talented, restless, brilliant, always ahead of the game but also tender and generous and vulnerable,” Erni wrote on social media. In a recent conversation, she told The Star, Smith’s mother told her that he “had a very high respect for the Parrish. It was a mutual sentiment — I really liked his work.”
Smith had two exhibitions at the Parrish, Erni said. “The first was in 2019 when he was a fellow at the Watermill Center,” a residency for visual artists. “We collaborated with them for several artists who were able to work there and then show at the Parrish.”
“Southampton Suite” was featured in the second exhibition, when the Parrish reopened after a monthslong closure in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. “He chose colors that were very reminiscent of this place, like yellow and blue,” Erni said. “They were very large paintings, and we hung them very close. It became a very intimate experience, in that room, of his work.”
In 2024, Erni said, Smith organized a one-night show in Montauk called “Panorama Rain.” Last year, he and a chef opened a revival of FOOD, a restaurant that had been founded by artists in the early 1970s, in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. “He was very proud of that,” Erni said.
Smith also founded STP, or Serving the People, a nonprofit commission-free platform for artists to show and sell their work. “He was really all about community and bringing people together,” Erni said, “providing a platform for artists and different creatives who wanted to go out on their own.”
He will be remembered as a great artist, Patterson said, as well as for the work embodied in STP. “I believed in him,” he said. “I saw his commitment not only to his own practice but to his care for other, younger artists that find themselves in the situation he was in when he was younger. He was such a forward thinker, not just taking the rewards of success but being conscientious and courteous of artists coming up.”
“He was this being that had such a bright light inside of him,” Patterson said. “It’s very important to celebrate him, to honor his wishes as an artist.”
