"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." Working at that newspaper, he met John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn. These men would gather for weekly meetings, ribaldly social as well as intellectual, at the studio of Robert Henri, a talented painter several years their senior. 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". Chafing under the limitations of the Genteel Tradition, he wanted them to consider the need for a new style of painting that would speak more to their own time and experience. 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. In Luks, he had a ready listener but also a man who was never going to be comfortable in the role of acolyte.