Smith acknowledged his debt to the De Stijl movement and to Mondrian, but stated that he was looking in his work to take the road beyond: "people said [Mondrian] had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so." As late as 1962, he continued to receive notifications for derivative influence: the "flawlessly executed" bas-reliefs of his exhibition for Eleanor Ward at the Stable Gallery were typified as "Arpish." But with the support of prominent gallerists in the late 1950s, by the mid-60s Smith had found an audience for his work as an independent voice. His artwork was included in two important group exhibitions, "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art (1965) and "Systemic Painting" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966). His two important series of the period, "Correspondences" and "Constellations" impressed reviewers with their interplay of form, color, and space. He introduced his "Constellation" series at the Galerie Chalette in 1969. In 1995, the Brooklyn Museum curated "Leon Polk Smith: American Painter," a retrospective exhibition of Smith's career. He was affiliated with numerous other prominent dealers, including Sidney Janis, Charles Egan, Betty Parsons, Galerie Chalette, and Denise René. From 1939 to 1948, Smith supported himself via teaching and teaching administration. He was State Supervisor of Art Education in Delaware, Assistant Professor of Art at the TC University System of Georgia, and accepted university teaching positions at Rollins College in Florida, New York University, and Mills College of Education in New York. Smith died in Manhattan in 1996, with an acknowledged position in the development of American geometric abstraction. He had arrived at geometry before others and remained steadfastly loyal to its principles, cultivating aspects of scale and simplicity that presaged the Hard-Edge and Minimal painting styles of the late 1950s and '60s. Younger painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Al Held visited his studio and came away inspired. But he cultivated a maverick attitude as a New York outsider that resisted definition as part of any single contemporary movement on the arts scene. This challenged his reviewers, as they looked for soundbites to describe his status and his work. When asked for his inspirations at a post-commencement speech roundtable, Smith cited the two professors of English who opened his mind to the beauty of Middle-English and Poetry, rather than name-dropping his contemporaries or artistic mentors.