Publishing Artistic Identity: George Luks, Public Drinking, and the Popular Press.

Throughout his life, American artist George Luks (1867–1933) actively cultivated his public identity as a hard drinking, raucous symbol of old New York. Like his contemporaries associated with the Ashcan School, Luks both patronized and painted eateries known for inexpensive food and saloons with reputations for free-flowing beer and wine. He depicted and discussed these venues in paintings and in the popular press. Additionally, he saved commentary on these establishments in a clipping scrapbook, where he also kept art critics’ discussions of his work and exhibitions. Luks’s last series of paintings, Scenes of Revelry in Old New York, is an expression of two important publics the artist leveraged to disseminate and authenticate his carefully crafted identity: (1) the bars and cafés of New York City, and (2) the pages of periodicals and magazines. The posthumous publication of the series in Vanity Fair in 1934 presents Luks’s depiction of his experiences in a New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. The paintings, contextualized for the reading public by Benjamin DeCasseres, compress Luks’s memories of bars and cafés from decades past. In Scenes of Revelry and in his personal scrapbook, Luks utilized the bars and cafés of New York City, in addition to the pages of magazines and newspapers, as a venue to for the performance of his constructed self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]