George Luks

Luks was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to Central European immigrants. According to the 1880 census, his father was born in Poland and his mother in Bavaria, Germany. His father was a physician and apothecary and his mother was an amateur painter and musician. The Luks family eventually moved to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in east central Pennsylvania, near the coal fields. In this setting, he learned at a young age about poverty and compassion as he observed his parents helping the coal miners' families. Luks began his working life in vaudeville. He and his younger brother played the Pennsylvania and New Jersey vaudeville circuit in the early 1880s while still in their teens. He left performing when he decided to pursue a career as an artist. Luks knew from a young age that he wanted to be an artist and studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before he traveled to Europe, where he attended several art schools and studied the Old Masters. He became an admirer of Spanish and Dutch painting, especially the work of Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals. Manet's energy and technique also appealed to Luks. Later he went to Düsseldorf, where he lived with a distant relative, allegedly a retired lion tamer, and took classes at the Düsseldorf School of Art. He eventually abandoned Düsseldorf for the more stimulating spheres of London and Paris.

In 1893, Luks returned to Philadelphia, where he eventually found work as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Press. As Robert L. Gambone writes, "Luks's experience as a Press artist-reporter proved seminal to his career, not so much for the work he accomplished as for the lifelong friends he acquired." Working at that newspaper, he met John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn. These men would gather for weekly meetings, ribaldly social as well as intellectual, at the studio of Robert Henri, a painter several years their senior. Henri encouraged his younger friends to read Whitman, Emerson, Zola, and Ibsen as well as William Morris Hunt's Talks on Art and George Moore's Modern Painting. Chafing under the limitations of the Genteel Tradition, he wanted them to consider the need for a new style of painting that would speak more to their own time and experience. Henri was a persuasive advocate for the vigorous depiction of ordinary life; he believed American painters needed to shun genteel subjects and academic polish and to learn to paint more rapidly. In Luks, he had a ready listener but also a man who was never going to be comfortable in the role of acolyte. In 1896, Luks moved to New York City and began work as an artist for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, where one of his assignments was to draw the popular Hogan's Alley comic strip series (featuring the Yellow Kid). Luks began drawing the Yellow Kid after its creator, Richard F. Outcault, departed the World for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. During his time as an illustrator there, he lived with William Glackens. Along with Everett Shinn and Robert Henri, Glackens encouraged Luks to spend more time on his serious painting. What ensued were several productive years in which Luks painted some of the most vigorous examples of what would be called "Ashcan art."

The rejection of many of their paintings, including works by Luks, from the exhibitions of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design motivated Henri's followers to form their own short-lived independent exhibiting group. Consisting of Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast, the group exhibited as "The Eight" in January 1908. Their exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York was a significant event in the promotion of twentieth-century American art. Although the styles of "The Eight" differed greatly (Davies, Lawson, and Prendergast were not urban realists), what unified the group was their advocacy of exhibition opportunities free from the jury system as well as their belief in content and painting techniques that were not necessarily sanctioned by the Academy. The traveling exhibition organized by John Sloan that followed the New York show brought the paintings to Chicago, Indianapolis, Toledo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and Newark and helped to promote a national debate about the new realism that the Ashcan school represented. Luks' Feeding the Pigs and Mammy Groody were seen as examples of this new earthiness many art lovers were not ready to accept.

Luks was a born rebel and one of the most distinctive personalities in American art. "He is Puck. He is Caliban. He is Falstaff," his contemporary, the art critic James Gibbons Huneker, wrote. Like many of the later Abstract Expressionist men, he made a great display of his masculinity and could seldom retreat from a dare. He took pride in being known as the "bad boy" of American art, liked to characterize himself as entirely self-created, and downplayed the influence of Robert Henri, or any contemporary, on his artistic development. He was given to hyperbolic statements and was often intentionally vague about autobiographical details, preferring to maintain an aura of self-mythologizing mystery. He was equally at home at a prize fight or in a tavern as in a museum or a gallery. Luks was always a heavy drinker, and his friend and one-time roommate William Glackens often had to undress him and haul him to bed after a night of drunken debauchery. Although many sources confirm this tendency, they also characterize him as a man with a kind heart who befriended people living on the edge who became subjects for his works of art. Examples of this are numerous: e.g., Widow McGee (1902) or The Old Duchess and The Rag Picker (both of 1905), in which Luks depicted with sensitivity elderly, down-and-out women who knew the harsh realities of the street. Luks was a paradox: a man of enormous egotism and a great generosity of spirit.

Luks was married twice but had no children. Luks was found dead in a doorway by a policeman in the early morning hours of October 29, 1933. Ira Glackens, the son of William Glackens, wrote about Luks's death that, contrary to the newspaper account stating that the painter had succumbed on his way to paint the dawn sky, he had actually been beaten to death in an altercation with a customer at a nearby bar. His packed funeral was attended by family, former students, and past and present friends. He was buried in an 18th-century embroidered waistcoat, one of his most valued possessions. He is buried at Fernwood Cemetery in Royersford, Pennsylvania.

1904: National Arts Club (Luks, Glackens, Henri, Sloan, Davies, Prendergast) 1908: The Macbeth Galleries exhibition of The Eight 1913: The Armory Show (six Luks paintings were included) 1937: New York Realists, the Whitney Museum of American Art 1943: The Eight, Brooklyn Museum of Art 1992: Painters of a New Century: The Eight and American Art, Brooklyn Museum 1994: George Luks: The Watercolors Rediscovered, Canton Museum of Art 1995: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, National Museum of American Art 1997: Owen Gallery, New York, 1997 2000: City Life Around the Eight, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2007: Life's Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush with Leisure, 1895–1925, The New York Historical Society 2009: The Eight and American Modernisms, Milwaukee Art Museum

The Butcher Cart (1901), Chicago Art Institute The Little Milliner (1905), Toledo Museum of Art The Spielers (1905), Addison Gallery of American Art The Wrestlers (1905), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Rag Picker (1905), private collection The Old Duchess (1905), Metropolitan Museum of Art Hester Street (1905), Brooklyn Museum of Art The Cafe Francis (1906), Butler Institute of American Art Woman with Macaws (1907), Detroit Institute of Arts Portrait of a Young Lady, (1908), private collection Sulky Boy (1908), Phillips Collection The Guitar (Portrait of the Artist’s Brother with his Son) (1908), Westmoreland Museum of American Art The New York River, New York (1910), private collection Nursemaids, High Bridge Park, private collection Boy with Baseball (1925), Metropolitan Museum of Art