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| Early in his career Theodore Lukits came under the spell of Asia and its timeless art. It is not known exactly where or when he began the close study of Chinese, Japanese and Indian art, but he was first exposed to these exotic cultures in his hometown of St. Louis, which hosted the world's Fair in 1904 when the future artist was an impressionable boy. In aletter to a collector in the 1960s, Lukits explained that he began collecting Asian antiques during his teenage years in Chicago. Most of the artists that he studied with matriculated in Paris during the years of the "Japonisme" craze and incorporated Asian influences or elements into their own work and then in turn, passed their appreciation and interest onto their students. Many of the artists who turned toward the East for inspiration were searchers, hoping to find or recover something that was missing or perhaps even forgotten in their own cultures. Lukits felt that the greatest artistic movements were ones that developed over the course of centuries and it was the qualities of constancy, artistic sophistication and timeslessness that he revered in Eastern art. He incorporated Japanese and Chinese screens as backdrops for his paintings, dressed his models in Chinese robes and Peking Opera headdresses and used Asian models for some of his most important works. Lukits built an impressive collection of Asian antiquities which he used for his mysterious still lifes. A strong Chinese quality can be detected in the delicate draftmanship of some of his pastel landscapes, while other, bolder landscape works, with their simple arrangement of almost abstract shpaes, show the clear influence of the Japanese woodblock prints that inspired so many European and American painters. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"Asian Princess" (circa 1960)
(Private Collection, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Adams)
"Contemplation" (circa 1930, Morseburg Galleries)