Born in Williamsport, Pa., in 1866,
Luks toured as a youngster with his brother William in a minstrel
act called "Buzzey and Anstock," and then studied at
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts and the Kunstacademie in
Dusseldorf and traveled to Europe where he came to admire Frans
Hals.
Luks became an illustrator for the Philadelphia
Press where he met John Sloan, William Glackens and Everett Shinn
and they would meet at the studio of Robert Henri, an artist who
emphasized the depiction of ordinary life, shunning genteel subjects
and painting quickly. The group became known as the "Philadelphia
Five," although they all individually migrated to New York
where Luks became an illustrator for the New York World and then
The Verdict. Luks for a while shared an apartment with Glackens.
In 1908, the five artists exhibited
together at Macbeth's Gallery along with Maurice Prendergast,
Ernest Lawson and Arthur B. Davies in a highly publicized attempt
to challenge the dominance and jury system of the National Academy
of Art. The artists were dubbed "The Eight" and Luks
sold one of his works in the exhibition to Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, who would subsequently found the Whitney Museum of American
Art.
He did not participate in the first
exhibition of "The Independents" in 1910 as he was about
to have his first one-man show at the Macbeth Gallery, but he
did exhibit at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, the
famous Armory Show of 1913. He subsequently joined the stable
of the Kraushaar Gallery, where he exhibited regularly for several
years before switching to the Rehn Gallery. He began to win some
important prizes such as the William A. Clark Prize from the Corcoran
Gallery in Washington and in 1920 joined Sloan as a teacher at
the Art Students League in New York. In 1925, he opened his own
school on East 22nd Street.
"Short and somewhat pudgy, with
a stray lock of hair always falling over his forehead, Luks developed
an ostentatious style of dress which favored flagrant prints,
capes, large fedoras and a monocle attached to his vest with a
ribbon," according to O'Toole.
He "prided himself in being the
'bad boy' of American art and would be pleased that this notion
has survived as his reputation as a significant painter of the
twentieth century continues to grow," she continued.
"A heavy drinker and engaged story-teller,
Luks manufactured details of his own life to make himself more
colorful. Most ingrained in his biography was his tall tale of
having fought in the Mid-West as 'Chicago Whitey,' a middleweight
boxing champion. No one ever checked his details. However, the
mythology Luks created around himself masked an insecurity that
reveals itself in the diversity of styles he sometimes employed
as a painter. His mainstay was realism, but he experimented with
impressionism and post-impressionism and was known to alter a
canvas if it was criticized, sometimes ruining it entirely,"
O'Toole wrote.
At his best, which was not all the time,
Luks was the best of the Ash-Can painters. His works abound with
verve and his masterpieces are startling. He is most often liked
to Hals, and the comparison is valid for his style proclaims a
jolly, exuberant love and sympathy for people.
A heavy drinker, Luks had health problems
and spent some time in a sanitarium. After a barroom brawl, he
was found dead in the doorway of a speakeasy in 1933. O'Toole
quotes his obituary of The New York Times as stating that his
paintings "were invariably virile; his versatility was astonishing,
and he painted as he lived - contemptuous of conventionalities,
impatient with snobbishness and full of the joy of life that so
many of his paintings reflected."
Unfortunately, Luks was not always at
his best and many his works disappoint: they often seem like very
rough sketches that are not all that well thought out or defined.
While the Ash-Can painters were focusing
on contemporary Americans in contemporary settings, other Americans,
such as Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keefe, Joseph Stella and Max Weber,
were experimenting with new abstract styles. The modernists were
more innovative, but the lusty heartiness of the Ash-Can painters
has an undeniable strength and was in its own way as revolutionary.
They had a modern outlook that scoffed at traditional virtues.
There is nothing academic about their work, nothing overly studied
and organized and refined, just a vibrant immediacy. At the same
time, there was little that was strident or political.
Luks is perhaps best known for "The
Spielers," a painting in the collection of the Addison Gallery
of Art in Andover, Mass., of two little girls dancing happily,
and for his loving though melancholy portraits of old women. But
his best work is quite different. One of the finest paintings
is "North River," a grayish view of Manhattan from New
Jersey painted about 1898 that is stunning and only priced at
$85,000. Another knockout large painting is the "L-Street
Brownies," one of many paintings he did in Boston where he
had a major patron, Margarett Sargent.
