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George Luks (b.1867, Williamsport, PA; d.1933, New York, NY) Pals, ca.1907 Oil on canvas Harriet Russell Stanley Fund 1943.11

George Luks (1867-1933)
Pals, ca. 1907

Portraits of urban city types were a favorite subject for painters of the Ashcan School. Pals is one of many paintings in which Luks depicted street characters holding or playing with animals. Often the human subject is an old beggar woman dressed in rags and homely to all but the artist's eye.

Pals shows an old woman dressed in black with grey hair, laughing joyfully while stroking the brightly colored plumage of a macaw. The contrast between the two—the one who has lost her beauty, the other resplendent in red, green, and blue—is overshadowed by their camaraderie. Luks's facile yet brusque technique is evident in the roughly treated features of the old woman; the red slash of her mouth and blue veins of her hand are evoked without extraneous detail or flourish.

Luks painted his humble subjects with compassion and pathos, imbuing them with dignity. He encountered them in his tireless walks around the city's working-class neighborhoods. As art critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted in 1909: "It is not a life without vulgarity, it may be, but it is the vulgarity of ordinary mankind . . . sane and beautiful for all those who can see beauty in what is generally classified as ugliness."

The son of Central European immigrants, George Luks was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and raised in the anthracite fields of the eastern part of the state. His father was a physician and his mother was an amateur painter and musician. In the 1890s, when he was employed as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Bulletin, Luks met John Sloan, Robert Henri, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn. Around 1900, these artists moved to New York to establish themselves as painters; they often exhibited together and later became known as the Ashcan School for their dark palettes and realist subject matter. Like several of his colleagues, Luks took a few trips to Europe, where he studied the work of Old Masters such as Frans Hals and Francisco Goya. Despite the European influences in his works, however, Luks was adamant in his characterizing himself as an American artist.

Luks was known for his brash confident brushwork and down-to-earth subject matter as much as for his ribald language, hard drinking, and love of barroom brawls. Sadly, however, true to his tumultuous life, Luks died in the doorway of a New York bar, having picked his last fight; the newspapers reported that he had died of heart failure while waiting to paint the light effects of dawn on the city.

For further reading:

Stanley L. Cuba, Nina Kasanof, and Judith O'Toole, George Luks: An American Artist (Wilkes-Barre: Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes College, 1987)
Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1995).

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This essay has been condensed from a larger manuscript written by Margaret Stenz for the museum's collection catalogue.