Luks painted working-class subjects and scenes of urban life, the hallmarks of Ashcan realism, with great gusto. "Hester Street" (1905), in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, captures Jewish immigrant life through Luks's vigorously painted representation of shoppers, pushcart peddlers, casual strollers, and curious onlookers of the ethnic variety that characterized turn-of-the century New York. Luks's work typifies the real-life scenes painted by the Ashcan School artists.
Hester Street also demonstrates Luks' ability to effectively manipulate crowded compositions and to capture expressions and gestures as well as gritty background details. but the term was applied later not only to the Henri circle, but also to such painters as
George Bellows (another student of Henri),
Jerome Myers,
Gifford Beal,
Glenn Coleman,
Carl Sprinchorn, and
Mabel Dwight and even to photographers
Jacob Riis and
Lewis Hine, who portrayed New York's working-class neighborhoods in a sometimes brutally realistic fashion. In 1905, Luks painted two of his most famous works, icons of the Ashcan school:
The Spielers, now in the collection of the
Addison Gallery of American Art, and
The Wrestlers, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. These two paintings also illustrate radically different aspects of Luks' temperament. In
The Spielers, two young girls dance frenetically, their joyous faces forming an appealing contrast to their grimy hands. Luks portrays the ability of working-class children to experience pleasure despite their circumstances. Sentimental or otherwise, he painted the truth, as he saw it, as his friend Everett Shinn wrote.
The Wrestlers, on the other hand, is a testament to masculine bravado, a massive, sumptuously painted canvas in which one beefy man has been pinned to the mat by another; the face of the defeated wrestler, turned upside down, stares straight at us. The pose is contorted, every muscle bulges, and the paint reflects the sweat and strain of the match. Luks was respected as a master of strong color effects. When interviewed on the topic, he said, "I'll tell you the whole secret! Color is simply light and shade. You don't need pink or grey or blue so long as you have volume. Pink and blue change with light or time. Volume endures." Although Luks is most well known for his depictions of New York City life, he also painted landscapes and portraits and was an accomplished watercolorist. His
visual perception was acute, no matter the genre, the art critic
Sadakichi Hartmann noted. In later years, he painted society portraits (e.g.,
Society Girl). His style was not uniform throughout his career, though.
The Cafe Francis (1906) contains more impressionist touches than his usual dark scenes of lower-class urban life, and his interest in documentary accuracy varied.
Sulky Boy (1908), for example, depicts the son of a doctor at
Bellevue Hospital who treated Luks for alcoholism, but it has been noted that Luks was more concerned with depicting the boy's demeanor than conveying an authentic representation of the surroundings. 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. One student, the painter
Elsie Driggs, remembered him as a charismatic force in the classroom. He enjoyed the adulation of his pupils and was a great raconteur. He was not interested in preaching the tenets of modernism; his commitment was to realism and direct observation. His work was also part of the
painting event in the
art competition at the
1932 Summer Olympics. ==Personality==