Old Beggar Woman (Primary Title)
George Benjamin Luks, American, 1867 - 1933 (Artist)
George Luks’s watercolor Old Beggar Woman attests to the democratic vision of the Ashcan artists, who believed that poverty, squalor, and old age have their own unique beauty and humanity. The cat, at right, is a common symbol in Ashcan art and, occasionally, early 20th-century American poetry and prose. The cat denotes dignity and vulnerability and sometimes functions as a human surrogate. One of literature’s earliest mentions of the term ash can appears in Hart Crane’s 1921 poem “Chaplinesque,” which also employs the cat motif:
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness
Works by Luks and other Ashcan artists frequently seek to redress the situation of that kitten—or human substitute— in the urban “wilderness,” or at least to grant it a place within the picture plane.
[No Title], Mary Baldwin College, October 6 – 30, 1967
A History of American Watercolor Painting, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, January 27 – February 25, 1942
George Luks – Memorial Exhibition, Newark Museum, Newark, NY, October 10, 1934 – January 6, 1935
Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by George Luks. C.W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, New York, 1923.
Paintings by a Few Modern American Painters, Lent by Arthur F. Egner, Newark Museum Association (10 January - 10 February, 1917): no. 10.
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