38 Facts About Theodore Lukits

Theodore Nikolai Lukits was a Romanian American portrait and landscape painter.

Theodore Lukits was a still life painter, muralist and founder of the Lukits Academy of Fine Arts in Los Angeles for more than sixty years.

Theodore Lukits had the reputation of a craftsman who made his own paints from raw pigments, constructed brushes and palettes, and designed and carved frames.

Theodore Lukits was responsible for keeping the "Beaux-Arts" methods of the French academic system alive in the western United States, and several of his students went on to prominent careers.

Theodore Lukits was a member of a number of professional art organizations and won many awards in competitions.

Theodore Lukits has been the subject of a number of solo museum exhibitions since his death, and his work has been included in a number of other museum exhibitions devoted to Tonalism and California and American Impressionism.

Theodore Lukits was born Nicolae Teodorescu in Timisoara, Transylvania, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Theodore Lukits came to the United States at age two when his family immigrated in 1899, and he grew up in St Louis, Missouri.

Theodore Lukits began formal studies at the St Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St Louis before he was twelve.

Theodore Lukits studied with Richard E Miller in St Louis, who had returned home from the art colony of Givery and was staying with his parents.

Theodore Lukits left public school after the 8th grade in order to pursue a career in art, with the full cooperation of his parents.

Theodore Lukits worked from an early age, first as an office boy and then as an airbrush artist, painting delicate girls' heads on leather.

Theodore Lukits moved to Chicago when he was fifteen to attend the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Theodore Lukits studied with William Victor Higgins, who later became famous as one of the Taos Ten of the Taos art colony.

Theodore Lukits began at the Art Institute of Chicago with evening, weekend and summer classes because he was unable to enroll as a full-time student until he turned eighteen.

Theodore Lukits worked under Edwin Blashfield at some point in his Chicago years, presumably as an assistant on a mural project in the Midwest, but it is not known when.

Theodore Lukits studied with the realist painters Robert Henri, Charles Webster Hawthorne, and George Bellows, who were guest instructors at the Art Institute during Lukits' tenure.

Theodore Lukits first met the Armenian artist in 1916 in Chicago, where he had an exhibition at the Art Institute of his figurative works and Asian-themed still lifes.

Theodore Lukits won every major award at the Art Institute, including the Bryan Lathrop Traveling Scholarship.

Theodore Lukits paid for his studies by painting illustrations for major publications such as Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post.

Theodore Lukits's last period of artistic study was a special scholarship which enabled him to study and travel with the Czech master of Art Nouveau, painter and Illustrator Alphonse Mucha who was exhibiting his Slav Epic murals in the United States.

The portrait Theodore Lukits painted of the Mexican actor Dolores del Rio was exhibited at the premiere of one of her films and reproduced in newspapers in Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Theodore Lukits opened the Theodore Lukits Academy in early 1924 and continued teaching until his retirement at age ninety.

Theodore Lukits was a well-known plein-air painter, choosing the pastel medium for more than one thousand sketches he did on location in the Sierra Nevada, Death Valley, the Mojave Desert, along the California coast and at the Grand Canyon.

Theodore Lukits has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California; the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, California; the Muckenthaller Cultural Center in Fullerton, California; and Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Theodore Lukits exhibited at a number of the premier Los Angeles galleries during the 1930s.

Theodore Lukits met the aspiring artist and actress Eleanor Merriam in 1931 when she came to study with him.

Theodore Lukits painted a well-exhibited pastel portrait of her in 1932, a prize-winning artistic oil portrait titled Gesture in 1934, and another portrait in 1936.

Theodore Lukits often worked on her pastels and paintings, and his bolder, more confident, stroke can be discerned, according to his biographer.

Eleanor Theodore Lukits was outgoing, and drew her husband into the social whirl of Los Angeles, where she cultivated patrons and portrait sitters.

Several years later, Theodore Lukits began dating Lucille Greathouse, a Disney animator and one of his students.

From 1952 to 1990, Lucile Theodore Lukits helped her husband run his school and business affairs, and her assistance helped put the school on firmer financial footing.

Theodore Lukits died in Utah in 2003 at the age of ninety-four.

The last generation of students that Theodore Lukits taught in the 1970s and 1980s included a number of notable figures.

In 1990, Lucile and Theodore Lukits, who was then in declining health, donated a large collection of his work to the Jonathan Art Foundation in Los Angeles.

Theodore Lukits's work has been part of many other museum exhibitions devoted to California Plein-Air Painting and figurative art.

The exhibition focused on Theodore Lukits' Asian-inspired work, and included stylized portraits, plein-air landscape pastels with Japanese art influences, and a few still lifes of Asian antiques.

Theodore Lukits made many studies and portraits of Mexican and Mexican-American sitters, some of which were preparatory works for mural projects.