George Luks (1867-1933)
The Guitar (Portrait of the Artist’s Brother with his Son), 1908
George Luks, a native of the logging town of Williamsport, moved with his family to Shenandoah in coal country when he was about six. His father was a doctor, and his upbringing a comfortable one. After study at the Pennsylvania Academy for a month in 1884, he went abroad. In 1894 he took a position as a staff artist with the Philadelphia Press, which is where he met the other newspaper artists who became part of Henri’s circle. Moving to New York in 1896, he was hired by the New York World, where he was joined by Glackens and Shinn in 1897.
The Guitar (1908) in its dark coloration and brushy style is typical of his early work, when his gusto for ordinary people and the street life of the Lower East Side is evident. In 1925, he returned for the summer to Pottsville, where his family had lived for a short time while he was growing up, to do a mural at a local hotel on the theme of the coal industry. While there, he executed a series of canvases portraying Pennsylvania anthracite miners in the mid twenties. Like many members of The Eight, Luks was a professor of art, first at the Arts Student League and later, at a school he established himself.
Luks traveled widely and led a life full of incident, but because he was an inveterate storyteller who cultivated a flamboyant public persona, it is often hard to separate myth from fact. Shinn described him as “a glutton for existence.” The subject matter, style, and quality of his work varies widely, but he loved to paint and was fascinated by the life around him.
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