A revelation of the great American realist painter's work as a
cartoonist and illustrator George Benjamin Luks (1867-1933) is renowned
for the oil paintings, watercolors, and pastel drawings he created as an
acclaimed member of the artists' collective known as the Ashcan School.
His professional development came, however, from his apprenticeship as a
newspaper and magazine artist. Luks spent his early career drawing
cartoons, spot illustrations, political caricatures, and comic strips
for the New York World and other papers. These early portraits and
stories of street urchins, peddlers, shopkeepers, and other ordinary New
Yorkers would all be revisited in his later painting. He achieved fame
when he took over drawing Hogan's Alley for Joseph Pulitzer's New York
World after the strip's originator Richard F. Outcault defected to
William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Life on the Press: The
Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks explores the roots
of the artist's career drawing turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York
City. The city's vital popular press served as a crucible in which a
number of American artists honed their talents and learned how to
communicate ideas to a broad popular audience. The resultant work, both
popular and controversial, challenged notions of good art and proper
subject matter. Robert L. Gambone's study brings Luks's early work to
light and reveals the funny, often edgy, and sometimes prejudicial
creations that formed the base upon which Luks built his later career.
Robert L. Gambone is director and curator of the Cahoon Museum of
American Art. He is the author of Art and Popular Religion in
Evangelical America, 1915-1940, and his work has appeared in Aurora and
the Journal of Art History.
