Theodore Lukits - Late Career

Late Career

The last generation of students that Theodore Lukits taught in the 1970s and 1980s included a number of notable figures. The Plein-Air pastelist Arny Karl (1940–2000) studied with Lukits from 1968 to 1978. The well known artist and longest serving President of the California Art Club Peter Seitz Adams (b. 1950) worked under Lukits' guidance for seven years, from 1970 to 1977 and the western landscape and cowboy painter Tim Solliday b. 1952) worked with him for five years. The art curator, writer and dealer Jeffrey Morseburg (b. 1957) studied with him for several years and went on to become Lukits biographer and to assemble his estate collection.

Other notable students of the 1970s included James Zapacosta, Kalan Brunink, Entera, Art Pastusak, Bridget Duffy, Leonore Rae Smith and Steve Brown. Of these students, Karl, Adams and Solliday went on to work extensively in the pastel medium in Lukits' tradition. 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. This collection, which includes a large selection of his pastels as well as a number of portraits, has been loaned out to museums for a number of the Lukits exhibitions that have been mounted after his death.