Maurice Becker

Becker was a radical political artist and illustrator in New York City. Born in Russia, Becker immigrated to the United States with his family in 1892; they settled into the Jewish community of the Lower East Side. Becker worked as a sign painter while taking art classes at night. By the mid-1910s he was publishing illustrations in New York newspapers and mainstream magazines, but he is best known for his contributions to The Masses and The Liberator in the teens and early twenties. From 1921 to 1923 he lived in Mexico illustrating for an English-language magazine there. Although he turned to painting in the 1920s, he also joined the Communist party, traveled to the Soviet Union, and remained a political radical throughout his life.