His initial fame came from his portraits of glamorous actresses of the silent film era, but since his death, his Asian-inspired works, figures drawn from Hispanic California and pastel landscapes have received greater attention.

He was a still life painter, muralist and founder of the Lukits Academy of Fine Arts in Los Angeles for more than sixty years.

Lukits was responsible for keeping the "Beaux-Arts" methods of the French academic system alive in the western United States, and several of his students went on to prominent careers.

[4][5] Lukits left public school after the 8th grade in order to pursue a career in art, with the full cooperation of his parents.

[7] Lukits began at the Art Institute of Chicago with evening, weekend and summer classes because he was unable to enroll as a full-time student until he turned eighteen.

[9] He also studied with the realist painters Robert Henri (1865–1929), Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930), and George Bellows (1882–1925), who were guest instructors at the Art Institute during Lukits' tenure.

[13] After he arrived in California he rapidly became known for his portraits of early Hollywood figures Theda Bara, Pola Negri, Mae Murray and Alla Nazimova.

[14] The portrait Lukits painted of the Mexican actor Dolores del Río was exhibited at the premiere of one of her films and reproduced in newspapers in Los Angeles and Mexico City.

He was a well-known plein-air painter, choosing the pastel medium for more than one thousand sketches he did on location in the Sierra Nevada, Death Valley, the Mojave Desert, along the California coast and at the Grand Canyon.

[15] In the early 1930s Lukits also did a series of paintings of vaqueros and female dancers that are now known as the Fiesta Suite, as studies for a mural project for Howard Hughes that was never completed.

[16] This series of pastel and oil studies depicted many of the horsemen and young Latino actresses who came to Los Angeles to work as riders, stuntmen and extras in Hollywood films.

[21] That same year Harry Muir Kurtzworth curated an exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library titled Tonal Impressionism, with the works of Frank Tenney Johnson, Jack Wilkinson Smith, Alson Clark and Lukits.

[24] In 1940, they purchased a comfortable Spanish-style home on Citrus Avenue, just south of Wilshire Boulevard, adjacent to the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

[citation needed] Eleanor Lukits was outgoing, and drew her husband into the social whirl of Los Angeles, where she cultivated patrons and portrait sitters.

[26] Lukits and his second wife lived a quieter social life, but they exhibited and were active with a number of Southern California's art organizations in the 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1990, Lucile and Theodore Lukits, who was then in declining health, donated a large collection of his work to the Jonathan Art Foundation in Los Angeles.

In 1998, a traveling show was organized under the auspices of the California Art Club, titled Theodore N. Lukits: An American Orientalist.

The exhibition focused on Lukits' Asian-inspired work, and included stylized portraits, plein-air landscape pastels with Japanese art influences, and a few still lifes of Asian antiques.

[34] One of his students, Kalan Brunink, followed his lead and became principal artist of the famed Old Town Olvera Street, Los Angeles and has a notable collection of Spanish-Mexican-American paintings and Mission San Juan Capistrano works.