Maurice BeckerModernist Oil Painting the Shop Window NYC 1940s WPA era

Details

Description

the Shop Window New York City, 1940s
17.75X25 sight size.

Maurice Becker (1889–1975) was a radical political artist best known … Read more the Shop Window New York City, 1940s
17.75X25 sight size.

Maurice Becker (1889–1975) was a radical political artist best known for his work in the 1910s and 1920s for such publications as The Masses and The Liberator.
Maurice Becker was born in Nizhni-Novgorod, Russia, the son .of ethnic Jewish parents. The family emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1892, moving to the Jewish community of the Lower East Side of New York City. His older sister was Helen Tamiris a modern dance pioneer and his brother Sam Becker was a sculptor. He studied with Ash Can (Ashcan) School artist Robert Henri in 1908. In 1913 Becker joined with Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Bellows and Stuart Davis in taking part in the famous 1913 Armory Show. Becker also began drawing cartoons. He was a great admirer of radical artists such as Art Young, Rockwell Kent and Robert Minor who were using their art in an attempt to obtain social reforms.
The young Maurice took night classes in bookkeeping and art while working days as a sign painter. He worked as an artist for the New York Tribune from 1914 to 1915, and for the Scripps newspapers from 1915 to 1918. He also contribute artwork on a freelance basis to a broad range of contemporary publications, including Harper's Weekly, Metropolitan magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post.
Maurice Becker is best remembered as an illustrator for radical magazines, most famously for the New York political and artistic magazine The Masses, to which he began to contribute in 1912.
Becker was a frequent contributor to the radical press, publishing his art in such periodicals as Revolt, The Toiler, New Solidarity, The Blast, Survey Graphic, The New York Call. and The New Masses. Becker's work, which often made use of the muted tones of graphite or charcoal, was likewise generally softer in political tone than the more hard-edged and biting work of his peers, who included Art Young, Fred Ellis, Robert Minor, Hugo Gellert, and William Gropper.
From 1921 to 1923, Becker lived in Mexico, where he worked as an artist for El Pulsa de México, an English-language magazine. After that time, he dedicated himself to painting full-time, essentially ending his career as a political artist for magazines. He did occasionally contribute art to political publications after that date, however, such as an apolitical drawing entitled "Summer," which ran in the August 1926 issue of The New Masses.
Becker remained a political radical throughout his life. He visited the Soviet Union in 1931. His name appeared on the letterhead of the Artists' Front to Win the War and he was a signatory to the call for formation of the American Artists' Congress. Maurice Becker died in 1975. He was included in the MoMA show Murals by American painters and photographers 1932, along with Ben Shahn, Stuart Davis, Bernice Abbott, George Biddle, Ernst Fiene and many other WPA and FSA artists.
Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. See less