Professional Career
After he arrived in California he rapidly became known for his portraits of early Hollywood figures Theda Bara, Pola Negri, Mae Murray and Alla Nazimova. The portrait Lukits painted of the Mexican screen legend Dolores del Río was exhibited at the premiere of one of her films and reproduced in newspapers in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Lukits began the Lukits Academy in the early 1924 and he continued teaching until his retirement at age ninety. He 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. In the early 1930s Lukits also did a series of paintings of vaqueros and female dancers that are know known as the Fiesta Suite, as studies for a mural project for Howard Hughes that was never completed. This series of pastel and oil studies depicted many of the horsemen and young Latino actresses who came to Los Angeles to work as riders, stuntmen and extras in Hollywood films. 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.
Read more about this topic: Theodore Lukits
Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or career:
“Smoking ... is downright dangerous. Most people who smoke will eventually contract a fatal disease and die. But they don’t brag about it, do they? Most people who ski, play professional football or drive race cars, will not die—at least not in the act—and yet they are the ones with the glamorous images, the expensive equipment and the mythic proportions. Why this should be I cannot say, unless it is simply that the average American does not know a daredevil when he sees one.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)