Theodore Lukits - Professional Career

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.