Lucien Smith, a genre-blurring artist known for his swashbuckling style and skateboarder cool, has died at 37. His death was confirmed by his friend Bill Powers, owner of Half Gallery in Manhattan, where Smith held his first solo exhibition in 2012. No other details were provided.

Smith rose to fame at 24 when his 2011 painting “Hobbes, The Rain Man, and My Friend Barney/Under the Sycamore Tree” sold at a Phillips auction for $389,000. The work, adapted from a Disney Winnie the Pooh film, was part of his senior thesis at Cooper Union. In 2014, another piece from his Rain series, “Two Sides of the Same Coin,” fetched about $370,000 at Sotheby’s in London.

The New York Times Style Magazine dubbed him a “wunderkind artist” in 2013, noting his rise from scrappy galleries to blue-chip shows with collectors like Aaron Bondaroff and David Zwirner. His solo show “A Clean Sweep” at the Suzanne Geiss Company featured scavenged brooms and city artifacts, and he collaborated with Glenn O’Brien on a short film.

Smith, of Asian and Black descent, modeled for Supreme and later exhibited at Virgil Abloh’s EM PT Y Gallery in 2018, with T-shirts selling for $350. Despite success, he soured on the spotlight, telling Vanity Fair in 2014, “I took the thing I loved to do and I made it into what I do for a living.”