Theodore Lukits - Education in Chicago

Education in Chicago

Lukits moved to Chicago when he was fifteen to attend the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. At the Chicago Academy he studied with the painter, illustrator and traveler Carl Werntz (1874–1944) who founded the school in 1902. He also studied with William Victor Higgins at the Academy, the landscape and figurative painter, who later became famous as one of the Taos Ten of the Taos art colony. Lukits began his career at the Art Institute of Chicago with evening, weekend and summer classes because he was unable to enroll as full-time student until he turned eighteen. Lukits studied with a number of instructors at the art institute, but his main teachers and mentors were the American Impressionist Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952), the society portrait painter Wellington J. Reynolds (1866–1949) and the figurative painter Harry Mills Walcott 1877–1930). Lukits worked under Edwin Blashfield (1848–1936) at some point in his Chicago years, presumably as an assistant on a mural project in the Midwest, but it is not known when. He also studied with the realist painters Robert Henri (1865–1929) Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930) and George Bellows (1882–1925) who were guest instructors at the Art Institute during Lukits' tenure. Another painters Lukits was influenced by was Housep Pushman (1877–1966). He 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. During his student days, Lukits shared a studio with the Swedish-born painter Christian von Schneidau (1893–1976). The two artists became friends in Chicago and would later renew their friendship in California where they both would paint portraits of movie stars. He won every major award at the Art Institute including the Bryan Lathrop Traveling Scholarship. During his studies at the Art Institute he paid for his studies by painting illustrations for major publications such as Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. After his graduation from the Art Institute in 1918, he returned for post-graduate work the following year under Karl Buehr. His 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 Alphons Mucha (1860–1939) who was exhibiting his Slav Epic murals in the United States. Lukits also attended Barnes Medical College to study human anatomy.