THE FASCINATING GEORGE LUKS

trips.

THE FASCINATING GEORGE LUKS

by Joan K. Yanni

Drinker, braggart, teller of tall tales, George Luks was the colorful bad boy of The Eight. But in his paintings he captured the pain and the joy of the streets, presenting his characters with a realistic but always sympathetic eye.

Luks was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1866, the son of a physician and his wife, both of whom were amateur painters. His early years were spent in Shenandoah, a small coal-mining town in eastern Pennsylvania, and he moved to Philadelphia in 1883. It is often hard to separate fact from fiction in details of his life, since his stories varied, but he insisted that he and his brother performed in vaudeville in the early Philadelphia years, in a Laurel and Hardy type comedy act, for George was short and stocky, his brother tall and thin.

His art training apparently began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There are no records of the years he attended the school, but he reported to a former curator there that Thomas Anshutz, who taught at the Academy and was the successor of Thomas Eakins, was the best teacher he ever had. Around 1885 he went to Europe, attending the Dusseldorf Academy in Germany and later studying intermittently in Paris and London.  MAG’s London Cabby (51.9) was painted in 1889 on one of his London trips.

London Cabby

The record is clear that in 1894 Luks became an artist-reporter for the Philadelphia Press, where he met Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens and Everett Shinn.  Late in 1895 he went to Cuba to cover the Cuban uprising against Spain for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. He sent back drawings that  were made a safe distance from the action—supposedly in a bar where he listened to stories of action at the front—and when the Bulletin terminated him, he joined the staff of the New York World.

At the World he found his true calling.  Luks was a superb draughtsman, and the World had just lost the artist who had been drawing the comic strip The Yellow Kid to a rival paper. Luks was assigned to continue the strip. For several years he worked as a cartoonist, also drawing Hogan’s Alley and McFadden’s Flats. The work appealed to his lazy side, too, for he could produce a lively, readable strip in half the time it would have taken most artists.

In 1897 his friends Glackens and Shinn joined him on the World.  Glackens, though working as an illustrator, had decided on a career as a painter, and he encouraged Luks to paint. Luks made amazing progress, filling sketchbooks with studies of colorful characters from the world of social outcasts—dockworkers, slum children, and derelicts.  Soon he was turning out dark, strongly brushed canvases similar to those of Glackens and Henri but more brutally realistic than theirs.  He was influenced more by Frans Hals and the 17^th- century Dutch painters than by his friends and contemporaries. He claimed that “There are only two great artists in the world: Frans Hals and little old George Luks.”  Did he really believe it?  Probably not, but it was a good way to raise hackles.

Luks and his friends exhibited at the National Art Club in 1904, an exhibit that clearly showed Luks’s powerful realism.  Some 

of the strongest work of his career was painted during this time: The Spielers, two young girls in dowdy clothes dancing joyfully together; The Wrestlers, a painting in which the two contestants show the pain and determination of the sport; Hester Street, with its pushcarts and vendors. He was driven by a deep-seated urge to present the people of the streets in paint.  MAG’s Boy with Dice (74.104) is the picture of a young boy, probably homeless, in shabby clothes, a cigarette between his lips, a die in his hand and a shoeshine box on his back. Yet the boy is strangely appealing; he elicits compassion rather than condemnation.

By the time The Eight (Henri, Luks, Glackens, Shinn, Sloan, Davies, Lawson, and Prendergast) exhibited in 1908, Luks was one of the most powerful realists of the group, yet always sympathetic to his sitters. He boasted, as usual: “I can paint with a shoestring dipped in pitch and lard…Guts! Guts! Life! Life! That’s my technique.”  Shoestring or not, Luks was equally adept in watercolor and in oils. The accuracy in his work is perhaps a carryover from his days as a newspaper artist.

In 1910 he had his first one-man show, and in 1913 he sent paintings and drawings to the Armory Show—the exhibit that shocked America and American artists with European Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism, techniques they had neither seen nor imagined. Americans who sought recognition for their own work were overshadowed by the foreign section.  Art in America was never the same.

After the Armory Show, though not necessarily because of it, Luks’s art moved into a more colorful and more solid phase, varied in mood and expression. Around 1925 he went back to his beginnings in the coal regions for a time and painted watercolors of miners’ shacks and oils such as The Miner, a large study of a seated, brooding worker signed  “George Luks, Pottsville, Pa.,” now in the National Gallery. He also created a large mural of a legend, Necho Allen Discovering Coal, which was the highlight of the largest—and one of the only—hotels in the town. During this period a wealthy art lover and landowner, who sold mining land to coal companies, supported him. In the coal region Luks continued to boast and brawl.  Usually he would start a barroom argument and, when all the members at the bar had loudly joined in, he would disappear and let the fighting go on without him. Claims that he had been a boxer who fought under the names of “Chicago Whitey”and “Lusty Luks” deceived nobody.

Luks taught for several years at the Art Students League, then founded his own school where he worked alongside loyal students who delighted in the “rowdy oldster.” Throughout his life he found people in all walks of life to whom he was attracted and who were fascinated by him.  He had an uncommon interest in people of all ages and situations.     

Brawling finally caught up with him. His beaten body was discovered one morning in 1933 in a New York City doorway, a tragic end to a uniquely talented American artist.

 Source: Perlman, Bennard, The Immortal Eight; curatorial files.