Being alone, of course, is not the same as being free. And after the drugs, the sex, the squats, the art, the casual stance toward hygiene and formality, some basic questions linger: Did Mr. Snow ever escape the East Side pedigree that caused him so much anguish? How long does someone have to live their life before they fully possess it? Was he on an inevitable crash course from the start?

IT was July 2007, and the myth of Dash Snow had ascended toward perhaps its steepest peak. He was married to Agathe Snow, another downtown artist, but Ms. Berreau  who declined to be interviewed for this article  was about to give birth to their child. It was during this period that two of Mr. Snow’s close friends died of heroin overdoses. His own career was on fire, but he had not yet been singed by the flames.

With the artist Dan Colen and others, Mr. Snow installed a Hamster’s Nest at Deitch Projects, a SoHo gallery. A Hamster’s Nest is what it sounds like, but with humans in the rodent roles: You shred a few hundred phone books, paint the walls, then ingest enough intoxicants so that every scrap of sentience disappears.

“It was really intense,” recalled Ms. Snow, whose divorce from Dash was finalized this summer, though she remained close to him to the end. “We were all really high, and there were concerts. It was like a whole other world, an intense moment, all these people with paper, piles of Yellow Pages, no air or ventilation and fumes everywhere. We were already so drunk. The iPods kept getting lost in the paper.” Three days later  with no clue how it happened  she woke up in Berlin.

That weekend was the end of what looked in retrospect like the innocent phase of Mr. Snow’s rebellion. There was notoriety, youth and beauty in copious proportions, a big show at one of the city’s finest galleries. Six months earlier, the New York magazine profile had traced his journey into prominence from his days as a mutinous graffiti tagger roaming the streets.

Image Dash Show making his mark as a graffiti writer in 2000. Credit... Ryan McGinley

It was a story that is fairly well known by now: how at 15 he helped found Irak NY, a graffiti operation led in part by a man with the Dickensian name Earsnot; how as a teenager he stole a Polaroid and always documented his location so as to remember it when he sobered up; how Mr. Colen and the photographer Ryan McGinley took him on as a fellow blithe spirit and something of a muse. They encouraged Mr. Snow to exhibit his collages of newspaper headlines, many of them revealing his obsession with Saddam Hussein, and his photographs of oral sex, nude girls, lines of cocaine being snorted off body parts. It worked: His first solo show was in 2005, and his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.