乔治·卢克斯认领

American artists who were intent on describing the spectacle of contemporary life during the first decades of the twentieth century often chose circus themes and clowns as their subjects. John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Walt Kuhn, and George Luks were among the many painters who identified with clowns, whom they saw as critics, outcasts, or enchanters-roles also filled by artists. Luks was no stranger to the kind of entertainment provided by clowns and even to the makeup they wore. In his late teens and early twenties, Luks and his brother, Will, had toured Pennsylvania and New Jersey with a minstrel show in an act called “Buzzey and Anstock” in which they sang, played guitar, and told jokes, performing in full costume with face paint. Even Luks’s behavior had clownish aspects: a heavy-drinker, inveterate story-teller, and street brawler, Luks was described by his fellow Ashcan painter, Everett Shinn, as “a circus in one” and “the clown who had found the circus ring too small and had dragged his antics out into the streets,” (“Everett Shinn on George Luks: An Unpublished Memoir,” Archives of American Art, April 1966, p. 5).Luks’s immediate inspiration to paint “A Clown” may have been the success of an exhibition entitled “Circus in Paint,” which Juliana Force had organized at the Whitney Studio Club in April 1929. He also may have been motivated by a visit to a fair in Hadlyme, Connecticut in the late 1920s (Pierre Théberge, “The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown,” New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 155). However, circus themes were part of Luks’s work much earlier in his career when he had been an artist-reporter, cartoonist, and illustrator. “Circus Scene” (gouache, Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes College) from 1895 shows a clown confronting a little boy. A cartoon by Luks entitled “The Animals Start a Circus and Make the Men Perform” appeared in the April 12, 1896 edition of the “New York World.” In 1911 he painted (and then altered in 1923) a portrait entitled “Jack and Russell Burke” (Museum of Art Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute), in which the young boys are dressed in bright orange and yellow clown costumes. Luks continued with circus themes after 1929. In about 1932 he painted “Entr’acte” (location unknown) showing a kindly-looking clown holding a boy on his lap. As with his street urchins and old women, Luks painted his clowns sympathetically. He clearly identified with these circus performers who made people laugh but were serious and perhaps melancholic within.Contrary to the usual perception of the Big Top performer and to Luks’s own reputation as a joker and comedian, Luks depicted the figure in “A Clown” as dignified and serious. He seems to be seated on a couch conversing with an unseen companion. To evoke the atmosphere of a circus, Luks employed brilliant color in defined shapes that form a decorative abstract pattern around the clown’s head; the daisy he holds is the only note of whimsy. The resulting image is striking, and as a result, Luk’s painting was chosen as the cover image for the magazine “The Arts” in May 1930. In turn, painter Jan Matulka used that journal as one of the elements in his own “Still Life Composition” in about 1933 or 1934 (Smithsonian American Art Museum), probably to pay tribute to the older artist who had given him much needed encouragement early in his career, (Edward Alden Jewell, “Jan Matulka,” New York Times, March 3, 1929, p. X13).John T. Spaulding, a Boston collector whose family made their fortune from sugar refining, bought “A Clown” from Luks’s New York dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn. Spaulding paid the princely sum of $4,000 (almost $50,000 in today’s currency) for the painting in December 1929, just two months after the stock market crash. He bequeathed “A Clown” to the MFA with the rest of his outstanding collection in 1948. Today Luks’s bold image has lost none of its power -“A Clown” was chosen for the cover of “The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown,” an exhibition catalogue from 2004.

George Luks, a realist painter associated with Robert Henri and the Ashcan school, chose the crowded streets of New York City, and the urban and rural poor as his subjects. He is noted for his broadly-brushed paintings of miners, elderly women, immigrant children, and wrestlers (see 45.9). In a lesser-known chapter of his life, Luks painted more than a dozen oils and watercolors during an extended visit to Boston in 1922 and 1923. He was the guest of a former student, Margarett Sargent McKean, a cousin of John Singer Sargent and an aspiring artist. Margarett Sargent had been an apprentice of sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1917, when she met Luks and began to study painting with him. By the late 1920s, she was painting strikingly modernist oils and began to exhibit her work at Kraushaar Galleries in New York.In 1922 Luks, fresh from a sanitarium where he was recovering from a bout with alcohol and recently divorced from his second wife, visited Sargent. By this time she was married to Quincy Adams Shaw McKean, a private banker in Boston. She later recalled that Luks had come to visit her for a weekend, but had stayed for almost a year. Not only did McKean provide living quarters for Luks, she also allowed him the use of her studio at 30 St. Botolph Street and organized an exhibition of his work in her summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts.McKean remembered that Luks disdained the Boston painters who remained in their prim studios painting hired nude models. He exclaimed, “Why didn’t they look at Beacon Hill, Commonwealth Avenue, the Swan Boats, fruit vendors on Charles Street, the squalor of St. Botolph Street and the vigorous L. Street Brownies?” (Margarett Sargent McKean, “George Luks,” Boston: Joan Peterson Gallery, 1966, brochure in MFA American paintings files). Luks threw himself into painting these subjects in Boston (see 60.538 and 1979.263). In “Noontime, St. Botolph Street, Boston,” he depicted the scene outside Margarett’s studio at midday when the shadows cast by the awnings were very pronounced against the old-fashioned bow-front facades of the buildings. These elliptical bays protruding from the structures on St. Botolph Street and elsewhere in the Back Bay and the South End were constructed beginning in the 1840s. They were peculiar to Boston and almost unknown in Luks’s New York City. St. Botolph Street is situated between the Back Bay and South End sections of Boston. Laid out in the early 1880s, St. Botolph Street initially attracted middleclass residents. By the early 1920s when Luks was painting in the area, most of the middleclass families had moved to the suburbs, the neighborhood had become more Bohemian, and many of the townhouses had been turned into lodging houses.In addition to painting the striped awnings against the yellow- and red-brick facades on St. Botolph Street, Luks also included an iceman carrying a block of ice with tongs. To the left is probably a part of the ice wagon’s wheel. Before refrigerators were introduced into most homes in the 1930s, food was stored in iceboxes, and blocks of ice were delivered door to door by an iceman. Luks’s inclusion of this unglamorous figure was typical of the Ashcan school artists, who made working people, from longshoremen to scrubwomen, the subjects of their pictures. Luks painted a related work entitled “St. Botolph Street,” depicting women sitting on their stoops socializing on a summer’s evening (“Skinner: American and European Paintings,” May 8, 1998, lot 220).Margarett Sargent McKean and her husband acquired many of Luks’s Boston paintings, including “Noontime, St. Botolph Street, Boston.” In 1960 the Museum purchased two of Luks’s Boston pictures, the present painting and “View of Beacon Street from Boston Common” (60.538).

By the late nineteenth century, concern arose that city children had insufficient access to the outdoors. The Playground Association of America, founded in 1906, was dedicated to promoting parks and recreation for urban children. George Luks’s “View of Beacon Street from Boston Common” illustrates this goal: two beautifully dressed young girls, accompanied by their governess, walk their dog in Boston Common, a large park in the center of the city. Although the common had been established in the seventeenth century for the communal pasturing of cows, by the nineteenth century it was an oasis of nature in the midst of the city.Best known for his gritty images of street life in New York’s poorer districts, Luks painted more prosperous people and neighborhoods when he visited Boston from 1922 to 1923. He was a guest of Margarett Sargent, a cousin of the artist John Singer Sargent. Wealthy and socially prominent, Margarett Sargent had studied drawing and painting with Luks in New York. Because she was his guide to Boston, Luks became familiar with the more affluent areas of the city, such as Beacon Street and the adjacent Boston Common. Behind the girls who are enjoying fresh air and exercise in the park, Luks painted the graceful bow fronts of the early nineteenth-century townhouses on Beacon Street, architectural features popular in Boston and almost unknown in New York.