Theodore Lukits - Posthumous Exhibitions

Posthumous Exhibitions

Since his death in 1992, Theodore Lukits work has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions at a number of museums in California. His work has also been part of many other museum exhibitions devoted to California Plein-Air Painting and figurative art. In 1998, a traveling show was organized under the auspices of the California Art Club. Titled Theodore Lukits: An American Orientalist, the exhibition was devoted to his Asian-inspired work. It included a number of the decorative portraits that Lukits did of Asian subjects, some of his plein-air pastels with a strong Japanese influence and a few of his still lifes of Asian antiques.

This exhibition, curated by Jeffrey Morseburg and Peter Adams, opened at the Pacific-Asia Museum in Pasadena, California, the organizing venue and then moved on to the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard and finally to the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, where it was combined with some of Lukits' Hispanic-themed works for a new exhibition titled Theodore Lukits: From Mandarins to Mariachis. These exhibitions included many of his high-key, brightly colored works. There was an illustrated color exhibition catalog with essays by Jeffrey Morseburg published in conjunction with the two Asian-themes exhibitions.

Lukits did many studies and portraits of Mexican and Mexican-American sitters, some of which were studies for mural projects. These works were the subject of two different exhibitions at Mission San Juan Capistrano, in 1998 and 1999. The second exhibition titled Theodore Lukits: The Spirit of Old California was centered on what has been called his "Fiesta Suite" a collection of paintings that were studies for a mural of an old California fiesta that was to have been done for Howard Hughes. Held at the Mission San Juan Capistrano Museum in the Old Soldier's Barracks of the historic mission, the exhibition was viewed by thousands of visitors to the mission. It included more than a dozen figurative works, a collection of pastels and some works that were actually painted on the grounds of the missions in the 1920s.

The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art has a notable collection of Plein-Air pastels by Theodore Lukits and two of his students, Peter Seitz Adams and Arny Karl. These have been central to two exhibitions at SAMA, one in 1999, devoted to landscape pastels and the other in 2008, which featured watercolors and pastels.

Mission San Juan Capistrano was the site of another Lukits exhibition in 2001 titled Romance of the Mission which was held in the courtyard of the mission in conjunction with the annual benefit dinner. Paintings and pastels by Theodore Lukits have also been included in a number of the California Art Club's Annual Gold Medal Exhibitions as part of their showings of works by historic members.