City. Lukits opened the Lukits Academy in early 1924 and continued teaching until his retirement at age ninety. 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. 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. 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. Lukits has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California; the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, California; the Muckenthaller Cultural Center in Fullerton, California; and Mission San Juan Capistrano. In addition to art students, Lukits taught Hollywood makeup artists. The prominent makeup artist Louis Hippe (1909–1967) advocated the study of drawing and anatomy under Lukits in order to understand the planes and facial structure of the human head and how it would appear under artificial light, and a number of other makeup artists followed him to Lukit's atelier in the 1930s and 1940s. Exhibitions From the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, Lukits had a number of solo exhibitions in southern California. The fall of 1926 may have been his most successful season. He had an exhibition at the Southby Salon on Larchmont Boulevard that opened on September 23. The review in the Los Angeles Times stated, "About 100 people attended. The event of the evening was the first showing of the artist's striking portrait of Ethel Wade." In November he had a showing in the salon of the Hollywood restaurant the Montmatre Cafe. His work included portraits, landscapes and marines. Along with Count Tolstoy and the actress Dolores Del Rio, he was the guest at a pair of receptions. Lukits exhibited at a number of the premier Los Angeles galleries during the 1930s. In February 1931, he had an exhibition at the Desert Gallery in Palm Springs. In June he had a large exhibition of landscapes, still lifes and portraits at the Stendahl Galleries. In 1935 he had a solo exhibition at the Barbara Hotel in Santa Barbara. In