Morris Kantor experimented with many subjects and styles throughout his long career spent mostly in New York. Kantor was born in Russia and moved to New York as a boy. He studied art at the Independent School of Art. As a young man he experimented with Cubism and Futurism. He moved on to a more realist style, but his forms remained stylized, angular, and distinctively modern. In time, fantasy elements (perhaps inspired by Surrealism) found their way into his work. In the 1920s Kantor lived and worked in Paris where his circle included the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Back in the United States in the 1930s, he supervised the Federal Arts Project's Easel Painting division in Rockland County, New York. In the 1940s he taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students League and kept a studio near Union Square in New York. He spent his summers in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and Monhegan, Maine.
