Modern Masquerades: Realism, Humor, and Identity in the Works of George Luks

At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was a nexus for the production of visual humor in the United States. It served as the publishing center for the main humor magazines of the era, as well as the hub of comic entertainment, such as vaudeville performances and circus acts. The city was also the site of significant societal problems, stemming from increased immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. This dissertation “Modern Masquerades: Realism, Humor, and Identity in the Works of George Luks,” explores how the American artist George Luks (1867–1933) used masquerade, caricature, and parody to explore the city’s dual nature as comic center and troubled metropolis in his art in the first decades of the 1900s. Known today for his association with the so-called Ashcan school and their commitment to representing the grittier aspects of the urban environment, Luks has been primarily discussed in American art history for his more “serious” depictions of working-class individuals, open-aired markets, and immigrant neighborhoods. This dissertation returns humor to his artistic practice and shows that the comic devices he learned in his earlier career as a vaudevillian and illustrator are present in his later paintings. This project analyzes the role of masquerade––a vaudevillian technique that capitalizes on performativity and doubling of meaning––in navigating racial, ethnic, class, and artistic identities at this transitional moment of the turn of the twentieth century, and examines how Luks rendered these performances of identity in print, paint, and drawing. It contends that Luks turned to his training as a comic artist as part of his self-fashioning as a modernist painter and considers how his use of masquerade, caricature, and parody expand our current understandings of Luks’s oeuvre, the Ashcan school, and urban realist painting.