George Luks

In 1905, when polite American painting still meant soft portraits and pretty landscapes, George Luks set two heavy, naked men grappling on a bare floor and called it The Wrestlers. He painted it partly to needle the Pennsylvania Academy, whose careful students he dismissed as pink-and-white idiots. It now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, still one of the most physical paintings in American art.

Luks had come up the rough way. Before he was a painter he was a newspaper man in Philadelphia and New York, a quick illustrator and cartoonist who for a time drew the Yellow Kid, the bald slum child of the first American comic strips. That world of tenements and crowded sidewalks stayed with him. With Robert Henri, the painter who led the revolt against genteel taste, he joined the group of eight artists who exhibited in 1908 simply as The Eight, painting the poor of Manhattan's Lower East Side when such people were thought beneath art.

His best-loved canvas, The Spielers, from that same year, shows two immigrant girls spinning in a street dance. Luks liked to boast and to drink, and both caught up with him. In 1933, at 66, he was found dead in a doorway on the Lower East Side after a late-night brawl, in the same streets he had spent his life painting.