"It's in You"

Pepsi-Cola Co., Encyclopaedia Britannica and Container Corp. of America (TIME, Apr. 30, 1945 et seq.) had all tested and proved the publicity value of fine art. Last week a Manhattan liquor importing firm, Renfield Ltd., was preparing to enter the same field in a small way with a traveling exhibition of twelve oils by the late, lusty, American-scene Painter George Luks.

All twelve paintings were black, white, grey and brown recollections of Manhattan gin mills and restaurants that Luks patronized shortly after the turn of the century: Luchow's, Paddy the Pig's, Mouquin's, Carey's Hole in the Wall. There was not a Man of Distinction in the lot.

Luks's paintings had more force than finesse; he knew the niceties of beer, bourbon, wine and cheese better than those of art, "It's in you or it isn't," he would shout when the discussion got around to painting techniques. "Who taught Shakespeare technique? Or Rembrandt? Or George Luks?"

The technique that Luks evolved for himself balanced sharp observation against broad execution. Using sharp contrasts of light and dark that never degenerated into mere silhouettes, he caught the shape and weight of his subjects in a few thick strokes of paint. He made his work look easy, which it was not, and fun to do, which it apparently was. Though he vastly simplified what he saw, none of Luks's pictures could be called art-for-art's-sake; he was a reporter in oils with a dramatic flair like that of his contemporaries John Sloan and George Bellows, and like them he regularly suppressed irrelevant details for the sake of a few telling ones.

Luks's picture of a toper hurtling headlong out of Carey's (see cut) was a case in point: the artist had given new zest to an already hackneyed theme by putting it in brutally simple terms and by contrasting the plight of the flailing drunk with that of his nerveless, serenely floating hat and stick. The artist was found dead in a Manhattan doorway in 1933; his art still hangs serene.

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