Here are domestic comfort, a north light, and plenty of models across the road in the open air, splashed by sunshine or shadowed by trees; babies, goats, nurse-girls, park loafers, policemen, lazy pedestrians, noisy boys, nice little girls with hoops, and the inevitable sparrows. Rocks are in abundance. The landscape “composes” itself. And you are not surprised, when ushered into the great studio on the second floor, to be confronted by canvases registering various phases of the vibrating world hard-by. Since he moved from down-town the painter is becoming more of a plein-airiste.
Luks doesn’t wander afar for subjects. He still loves the familiar, the homely, the simple. It had been several years since I saw his work. Occasionally in Holland I would rim across a canvas by Jan Steen, Adrien Brouwer, or even Hals, that recalled Luks. His artistic affinities are Dutch rather than French; above all, he is an American painter to his blunt finger-tips. Beginning in the field of illustration, he was plunged up to his eyes in New York life. I believe it was Arthur Brisbane who first suggested to him that he should go in for painting in oils.
He went to Düsseldorf and survived that trying experience—a school that would submerge a Manet. Paris followed. But George is not a product of the schools. Theories sit lightly on his mercurial shoulders. He loathes “movements,” and refers to the “new” men, cubists, lamp-post impressionists, and futurists in words that curdle the blood. Indeed, his vocabulary is as variegated and picturesque as his palette. As for the personality of the man—well, it is absolutely impossible to set down on paper any adequate description of him. He is Puck. He is Caliban. He is Falstaff. He is a tornado. He is sentimental. He can sigh like a lover, and curse like a trooper. Sometimes you wonder over his versatility; a character actor, a low comedian, even song-and-dance man, a poet, a profound sympathizer with human misery, and a human orchestra. The vitality of him!
Perhaps the simile of a man-orchestra is the most fitting. Did you ever see and hear those curious creatures, less rare in our streets a quarter of a century ago than now? I remember one in a small French city, a white-haired fellow who, with fife, cymbals, bells, concertinas—he wore two strapped under either arm—at times fiddles, made epileptic music as he quivered and danced, wriggled and shook his skull. The big drum was fastened to his back, upon its top were cymbals. On his head he wore a pavilion hung with bells that pealed when he twisted his long skinny neck. He carried a weather-worn violin with a string or two missing; while a pipe that might have been a clarinet years before emitted but cackling tones from his thin lips. By some incomprehensible co-ordination of muscular movements he contrived simultaneously to sound his armory of instruments; and the whistling, screeching, scratching, drumming, wheezing, and tinkling of metal were appalling. But it was rhythmic, and at intervals the edge of a tune might be discerned sharply cutting through the dense cloud of vibrations, like the prow of a boat cleaving a fog. And the reverberating music swelled, multifarious and amazing, as if a military band, from piccolo to drum, were about to descend upon the town. A clatter and bang, a sweet droning and shrill scraping were heard, as the old chap alternately limped and danced in the middle of the roadway.
Now, George Luks is not venerable; he is a comparatively young man, yet he reminds me of that human orchestra. It is an image of lithe activity that he suggests. What has this to do with his art? Much. It is rhythmic, many-colored, intensely alive, charged with character and saturated with humanity, not forgetting humor. Pathos is not absent. In his latest productions I noted with satisfaction more repose, deeper feeling, more solicitude for his surfaces, the modulation of tones; and the same old riotous joy in color for color’s sake. Yes, in his themes he still belongs to the illustrators. He seldom tells a definite story, but there is no mistaking his point of view.
I saw portraits of girls in masquerade that were expressed in terms of beautiful paint. A little red-head, the sheer tonal charm immediate, made me think of both Henner and Whistler. Then a Hals-like head, virile and sincere; a sensitively limned portrait of a young girl, his niece; a large canvas; charming girls under umbrageous trees, a veritable gamut of greens; an old woman who simply cried to be framed and exhibited—how many things did I not stare at, wondering over the inexhaustible fecundity, and groaning over the reckless prodigality, of this gifted man! With a tithe of his talent and personal quality other painters have achieved renown. However, he is not lacking in honors. He has plenty of admirers, plenty of commissions; yet do his friends wish that he would sometimes apply the brakes to that fiery temperament of his and steer his bark into less tumultuous waters. His art would gain thereby in finish, and distinction, and repose. And it might also die.
I once called George Luks “a hand and an eye.” His power of observation is great. He has the intensity of a Spaniard and the realism of a Dutchman. He is both exact and rebellious. Wherever he happens to pitch his tent becomes his studio; preferably in the open. But the East Side is his happy hunting-ground. In the Yiddish restaurants where old men with Biblical heads drink coffee and slowly converse; on Houston Street, when, apparently, the entire population is buying fish Shabbas-abend; in vile corners where the refuse of humanity drift, helpless, hopeless—there Luks catches some gleam of humor or pathos, some touch that Gorky-like brings before us in a dozen strokes of the brush or pencil a human trait which emerges to the surface of this vast boiling kettle like a spar thrown up by an angry sea. All happiness is not lost in those mean streets; a rift of wintry sunlight, a stray tune from some wheezy barrel-organ, and two children waltz with an unconscious zest of life that will survive until they are nonogenarians. Of such contrasts Luks is the master.
His Spielers is like a quivering page from—from whom? The East Side is yet to boast its Dickens. And Dickens would have enjoyed the picture of the little tousled Irish girl, with her red locks, who dances with the pretty flaxen-haired German child, surely a baker’s daughter from Avenue B. Now, you might suppose that this vivid art, this painting which has caught and retained the primal jolt and rhythm of the sketch, must be necessarily rude and unscientific in technique. It is the reverse. This particular picture is full of delicious tonalities. The head of the blonde girl might be from an English eighteenth-century master, and the air—it fills the spaces with a fluid caress.
And his Little Gray Girl, a poor wisp of flesh wearing a grotesque shawl and hat, shivering in the chill of a gloomy evening, sounds touching music. The note of sentiment is not forced; indeed, the passages of paint first catch the eye, modulations of grays and blacks that tell of the artist’s sensitive touch. He has wanton humors. He paints a French coachman, life-size, seated at a café table about to swill brandy. It is so real that you look another way. Or you are shown a collection of beggars who were famous a few years ago on Sixth Avenue, Broadway, the east side, Fulton Market: Matches Mary, the Duchess, the tottering Musician, the old Italian, “Gooda nighta, Boss!” and a host of nocturnal creatures since dead or in the hospital, perhaps in jail. Luks is their interpreter. Nor does he lean to the pessimistic; he is a believer in life and its characteristic beauty. The pretty he abhors.
There is the Duchess. In life she was an elderly hag with a distinguished bearing, a depraved woman of rank, who wore five or six dresses at once, on her head a shapeless yet attractive gear, and in her pocket she carried a fat roll of bills for purposes of dissipation, or bribery, or for bailing out some Tenderloin wreck. She is maleficence incarnate. Just fancy this bird of the night set forth by a sympathetic brush, endowed with a life that overflows the canvas, and you see this grande dame strut by, the embodiment of evil, yet a duchess à la Sir Johsua, though à rebours. It is a sinister art which recalls the genius of Toulouse-Lautrec. With Lautrec the work of Luks has certain affinities. He may never have studied that painter; rather is it a temperamental resemblance, a certain tolerant way of seeing men and things. But Luks is not so cynical as the Frenchman.