Theodore Lukits was a portrait painter with a theatrical style and a love of color. These qualities made him an ideal artist to paint many of the great beauties of Hollywood's Golden Age. While Lukits was still living in Chicago, he attended a motion picture convention where he met the famous silent film "vamp" Theda Bara (1890-1955). Theda Bara was one of the great characters of the silent era. Early film fans were told she was the daughter of a French painter and an Arabian princess and that she was born in a Bedouin tent beneath the great pyramids. Her name was said to be an anagram for Arab death. Actually, she was a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati. Theda Bara became the first of Hollywood's "bad girls" and the counterpoint to Mary Pickford, who was known as"America's Sweetheart." After Lukits painted her portrait in Chicago, Bara was so pleased that she encouraged him to move to Los Angeles, where she told him there was not only the social elite but a growing new film aristocracyto rely upon for commissions. Since Lukits' parents had already migrated west to join his older sister Mary and her husband, the opportunity to paint the Hollywood stars and the lure of the California landscape proved irresistible, and he first ventured west in the fall of 1921. In California he worked as an artist for Foster and Kleiser, the pioneering billboard firm, while he exhibited the colorful decorative portraits that he had brought with him from Chicago and worked to build a reputation as a portrait painter. Hollywood's original "bad girl" Theda Bara as the first Cleopatra in 1917                    Lukits loved painting beautiful women and they clearly enjoyed being painted by him. During the 1920s he painted the Polish actress. In California he worked as an artist for Foster and Kleiser, the pioneering billboard firm, while he exhibited the colorful decorative portraits that he had brought with him from Chicago and worked to build a reputation as a portrait painter. Lukits loved painting beautiful women and they clearly enjoyed being painted by him. During the 1920s he painted the Polish actres Pola Negri, Theda Bara's successor as the femme fatale; dramatic actress Mae Murray; and the Russian temptress Alla Nazimova. Pola Negri was a star in Poland and Germany before the studios brought her to America and she made Hotel Imperial (1927). She led a love life that lived up to her Hollywood billing: she was linked to Charles Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino and married, in order, a Baron, a Count and a Prince. Lukits painted Negri while she was at the height of her fame. This work, which has disappeared, may be in the Midwest.     Theodore Lukits about the time he met Theda Bara (photograph taken June 1920)        In the words of film historian Jeanine Bassinger, Pola Negri "may have been the most colorful star to ever appear in silent films." She was born Barbara Appolonia Chalupiec in Janowa, Poland, and she studied drama in Warsaw and ballet in St. Petersburg. She met the actor and director Ernest Lubitsch in Berlin and they made "The Mummy," "Carmen," "Madame Du Barry," and "Gypsy Blood" in Germany, and it was these imported films and her earthy sexuality that brought her to Hollywood. Negri's Rolls Royce was white and upholstered in white velvet and she was usually accompanied on drives by two Russian wolfhounds and a chauffer dressed in white. She was seen on Sunset Boulevard with a pet tiger on a leash. Negri made dozens of successful Hollywood films including "Bella Donna," "The Spanish Dancer," "Men," and "Forbidden Paradise." Negri's Hollywood career faded in the 1930s and she made films in Europe between the wars, returning to America when war threatened. Her final film was Disney's "Moon Spinners" in 1964. Pola Negri was already a major star when she came to America with her director Ernst Lubich                          Mae Murray was a major film star known for her extravagant lifestyle, her beauty, and her feuds with famed director Erich von Strondheim on the set of "The Merry Widow," her most famous film. Murray was said to have made three million dollars a year, and came to the set in a gold-plated Rolls Royce limosine replete with wet bar and ermine and sable trimming. When she got married, and walked out on producer Louis B. Mayer to honeymoon, she was blackballed. Theodore Lukits painted her while at the height of her fame, and said it was the actress who insisted on being painted in the nude. Murray's fall was precipitous, and late in life she could be seen walking the streets of Hollywood, her face adorned in thick, pancake makeup, reminiscent of her silent film days.                                             Mae Murray was known for her beauty, extravagant lifestyle and tempestuous personal life               Silent film actress Mae Murray posed for "Harmony in Green and Silver." This painting, like many of Lukits's works, was lit by colored lights. Hollywood Boulevard (center) before the coming of the film industry. In ten years it grew from five to thirty thousand inhabitants, and seven hundred films were made each year.