"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with the second of three 12-piece Exhibitions of works by George Benjamin Luks  (1867-1933) a realist painter, member of the group known as “The Eight” and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of art.

 

Luks was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania to Central European immigrants. The Luks family eventually moved to Pottsville, in southern Pennsylvania near the coal fields. George joined the Pennsylvania and New Jersey vaudeville circuit as a teenager, but later realized he wished to be an artist. He studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before traveling to Europe, where he studied the Old Masters.  He became a particular admirer of Spanish and Dutch painting, especially the works of Diego Velazquez and Frans Hals. He also admired the Impressionism of Edouard Manet. Luks enrolled for classes at the Düsseldorf School of Art before eventually investigating the art scenes of London and Paris.

 

After Luks returned to Philadelphia in 1893, he took a job as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Press. It was there that he met and befriended John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn, the nucleus of what we would become known as “The Eight,"and the founders of the Ashcan School of art. Encouraged by the older artist Robert Henri, this young group of painters stuided the works of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emile Zola, and Henry Ibsen,  as well as William Morris Hunt's Talks on Art and George Moore's Modern Painting. The group rejected the rigid ideals and traditional practices of the conservative National Academy of Design in favor of the immediacy of capturing the social realism of their own time. Consisting of Henri, Luks, Glackens, Sloan, Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast, the group exhibited as "The Eight" in January 1908. Thus the Ashcan School of art was born.  

 

Luks moved to New York City In 1896, and became a staff artist for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. During his time as an illustrator there, he lived with Glackens, Shinn and Henri, who encouraged him to pursue a serious career as a painter. Like Henri and Sloan, Luks was also a teacher, first at the Arts Students League on West 57th Street in Manhattan and, later, across the street at a school he established himself, which remained open until the time of his death, in October of 1933.

 

Today, Luks’ genre paintings of urban subjects are considered some of the finest examples of the Ashcan School of American art.