Theodore N. Lukits (1897-1992)
             
 

"At the Dressing Table - Illustration"   9 1/4 " x 8 3/8 "  Gouache
(c. 1917/18)
(Collection, California Art Club)
 
     Theodore Lukits worked commercially during three different periods in his long career. First, during his student years in St. Louis and Chicago, then in the first few years he lived in Los Angeles while he established himself as a fashionable portrait painter and finally in the late 1950s when did commercial work as a favor to a friend. Lukits grew up in the first decades of this century when child labor laws were a novelty, and because of his precocious abilities he was able to help support the family as an airbrush artist while still in his early teenage years. Then he worked as a jewelry designer in his first two years in Chicago. About the time he was seventeen he began working as an illustrator for the Republic, one of Chicago’s landmark commercial and resedential buildings. By the time he was nineteen, in the midst of American Illustration’s “Golden Age,” he had moved to S & J Illustration Service where he did illustrations for Chicago stores like the famed Carson Pirie & Scott as well as national publications that included Colliers, Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, Lady’s Home Journal, Vanity Fair and Vogue. When Lukits arrived in Los Angeles he initially worked for Foster & Kleiser, the pioneering outdoor advertising firm, but once he developed a reputation as a fine artist and began his own art academy he set commercial work aside. In 1957, his lifelong friend Gino Raffaelli, Art Director at Pacific Outdoor, received a difficult contract for large painted billboards that required painting heads many times life size and he convinced Lukits to work for him on a limited schedule to do the prototype billboards that would be copied by other artists. These commercial experiences were especially valuable to Lukits as the majority of his students were likely to work in a commercial field for part if not all of their career.  
     
       
           
  Cover proof - possibly showing Chicago's famous Carson Pirie & Scott Department Store at Christmas, circa December 1918     Asian-themed cover for Midwest-based Milady Beautiful Magazine, June 1919  
    Catalog cover for Carson Pirie Scott Department Store       Colorful At Nouveau-tinged illustration by Theodore Lukits, January 1919  
  Colorful illustration, December 1919, Fashion Art       1919 vignette illustration for O-Cedar Polish by Theodore Lukits, done while he was at S&W Illustration Service    
  One of Lukits' later cover illustrations, March 1920   Illustration for Athena underwear, done by Lukits circa 1919  
  Cover for Detroit publication Fort Dearborn Magazine, completed shortly before Lukits left for California     Lukits completed this vignette illustration for S&W Illustration Service in 1919  
               
more Illustration material on page 2