After travelling and studying in Europe, Luks worked as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist in Philadelphia, where he became part of a close-knit group, led by Robert Henri, that set out to defy the genteel values imposed by the influential National Academy of Design.

As Robert L. Gambone writes, "Luks's experience as a Press artist-reporter proved seminal to his career, not so much for the work he accomplished as for the lifelong friends he acquired.

Henri encouraged his younger friends to read Whitman, Emerson, Zola, and Ibsen as well as William Morris Hunt's Talks on Art and George Moore's Modern Painting.

Henri was a persuasive advocate for the vigorous depiction of ordinary life; he believed American painters needed to shun genteel subjects and academic polish and to learn to paint more rapidly.

Luks began drawing the Yellow Kid after its creator, Richard F. Outcault, departed the World for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.

Consisting of Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast, the group exhibited as "The Eight" in January 1908.

Although the styles of "The Eight" differed greatly (Davies, Lawson, and Prendergast were not urban realists), what unified the group was their advocacy of exhibition opportunities free from the jury system as well as their belief in content and painting techniques that were not necessarily sanctioned by the Academy.

[11] The traveling exhibition organized by John Sloan that followed the New York show brought the paintings to Chicago, Indianapolis, Toledo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and Newark and helped to promote a national debate about the new realism that the Ashcan school represented.

"Hester Street" (1905), in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, captures Jewish immigrant life through Luks's vigorously painted representation of shoppers, pushcart peddlers, casual strollers, and curious onlookers of the ethnic variety that characterized turn-of-the century New York.

Hester Street also demonstrates Luks' ability to effectively manipulate crowded compositions and to capture expressions and gestures as well as gritty background details.

The Ashcan School successfully challenged academic art institutions, and the authority of the National Academy of Design as a cultural arbiter declined throughout the 1910s.

At a time when the realist fiction of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris was gaining a wider audience and when muckraking journalists were calling attention to slum conditions in American cities, the Ashcan painters played a role in enlarging the nation's sense of what a suitable topic for artistic expression might be.

The first known use of the "ash can" terminology in describing the movement was by Art Young, in 1916,[12] but the term was applied later not only to the Henri circle, but also to such painters as George Bellows (another student of Henri), Jerome Myers, Gifford Beal, Glenn Coleman, Carl Sprinchorn, and Mabel Dwight and even to photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who portrayed New York's working-class neighborhoods in a sometimes brutally realistic fashion.

The Cafe Francis (1906) contains more impressionist touches than his usual dark scenes of lower-class urban life,[16] and his interest in documentary accuracy varied.

He took pride in being known as the "bad boy" of American art, liked to characterize himself as entirely self-created, and downplayed the influence of Robert Henri, or any contemporary, on his artistic development.

Luks was always a heavy drinker, and his friend and one-time roommate William Glackens often had to undress him and haul him to bed after a night of drunken debauchery.

[22] Although many sources confirm this tendency, they also characterize him as a man with a kind heart who befriended people living on the edge who became subjects for his works of art.

Examples of this are numerous: e.g., Widow McGee (1902) or The Old Duchess and The Rag Picker (both of 1905), in which Luks depicted with sensitivity elderly, down-and-out women who knew the harsh realities of the street.