Jacob Burck

Jacob Burck (née Yankel Boczkowsky, January 10, 1907 – May 11, 1982) was a Polish-born Jewish-American painter, sculptor, and award-winning editorial cartoonist.

Jacob Burck was born Yankel Boczkowsky on January 10, 1907, in Wysokie Mazowieckie, Poland (then Russia), the son of ethnic Jewish parents, Abraham Burke, a bricklayer, and Rebecca Lew Burke.

Burck emigrated to the United States at age six and lived in Cleveland until 1924.

He attended the Cleveland School of Art on a scholarship after he was discovered on a Cleveland sidewalk sketching instead of attending elementary school.

When he was seventeen years old, Burck travelled to New York City to study at the Art Students League of New York (ASL) under Albert Sterner and Boardman Robinson.

Active in the Communist movement from 1926 as a political cartoonist and muralist, Burck quit the Communist Party after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936, deeply offended by political demands there to manipulate his work.

Upon his return to the United States, Burck drew political cartoons for two large mainstream dailies, the St. Louis Post Dispatch and then, for 44 years, the Chicago Daily Times (later as the Chicago Sun-Times).

Burck joined the revolutionary movement in 1926, while still a teenager.

Burck's political cartoons were a regular feature in the Daily Worker's annual collection, Red Cartoons, published each year from 1926 to 1930.

In 1927 or 1928, Burck began to draw occasional editorial cartoons for the Communist Party's daily newspaper, The Daily Worker, as well as its monthly artistic-literary magazine, The New Masses. He went on staff at The Daily Worker full-time as cartoonist in 1929.

Burck's circle of friendships with his fellow students there, such as Reginald Marsh, and the other artists, intellectuals, and political activists of 1930s New York, were to shape the course of his career.

At the ASL he met and later married fellow art student Esther Kriger, in 1930.

Burck first worked professionally as an artist as a portrait painter, an occupation which he pursued full-time for one year.

In 1931, Burck was a founding Director of the "New York Suitcase Theater", along with playwright Paul Peters, poet Langston Hughes, and writer Whittaker Chambers.

Burck's work was exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art's First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Prints, which opened in December, 1933.

Evidence presented to the Dies Committee lists Burck in May 1933 as a contributing editor (with Henri Barbusse, Cyril Briggs, Whittaker Chambers, Robert W. Dunn, Maxim Gorky, Harry Gannes, Grace Hutchins, Robert Minor among others) of Labor Defender, the monthly magazine of International Labor Defense, the American Communist Party's legal defense organization.

He also contributed work to the official organ of the party's social and fraternal organization, the International Workers Order.

In 1934, "The American Scene No. 1: A Comment upon American Life by America's Leading Artists" was published, a portfolio of six lithographs by Burck and his colleagues, George Biddle, Adolf Dehn, George Grosz, Reginald Marsh, and José Clemente Orozco.

Burck was an accomplished muralist and exhibited groups of murals along with Edward Laning in the gallery of the Art Students League.

Burck was commissioned by the Soviet travel agency, Intourist, to create a five-panel mural for its New York offices, depicting the construction of large-scale industry in the Soviet Union.

A New York Times review of studies for the murals stated, "Mr. Burck has arranged his figures with uncommon skill, achieving a pattern of splendidly organized vitality."

Plans were changed however and the panels were shipped to Moscow for display at the Museum of Modern Western Art prior to being installed in Intourist's Moscow office.

This was a period in which the so-called "Cult of Personality" around Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was in full swing.

While adapting the murals for the new location, Burck took umbrage to the Soviet government's insistence that he modify the content of his work to glorify Stalin.

The couple returned without completing the mural.

This episode marked the end of Burck's connection with the Communist movement.

He subsequently worked for a short time as a sign painter, his 1935 official biography claiming this decision was related to Burck's belief that this constituted "a more wholesome means of earning a living [than painting society portraits]."

Nevertheless, Burck continued his artistic practice, including portraiture.

His material was also gathered for a full-length book in 1935, a 248-page work entitled Hunger and Revolt.

Burck was close friends with Alexander Calder, Whittaker Chambers (husband of ASL classmate Esther Shemitz), Langston Hughes, Meyer Schapiro, and many other figures in the New York art and progressive scene.

During this period, he exhibited with other prominent artists, including: George Grosz, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Reginald Marsh, Jean Charlot, Thomas Hart Benton, Hugo Gellert, William Gropper, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Julio Castellanos, John Flannagan (sculptor), and Louis Lozowick.

After returning from the USSR in 1937, Burck went to work as an editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, before moving to the Chicago Daily Times in 1938.

Burck's incisive and biting style led to his daily cartoons being syndicated by Field Newspaper Syndicate of Field Enterprises in more than 200 newspapers across the United States.

Burck's signature style, with India ink with brush, grease pencil, or lithograph crayon, was soon adopted by Bill Mauldin and most other editorial cartoonists of the 1940s and 1950s.

Burck was awarded the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

Burck won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning while at the Chicago Daily Times in 1941 for a cartoon titled, If I Should Die Before I Wake.

In 1942, he received the inaugural Society of Professional Journalists prize for editorial cartooning, the Sigma Delta Chi Award.

Burck's continued style and criticism through cartooning of politicians, hypocrisy, and social injustice left him an open target during the Second Red Scare of the 1950s.

Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated his early, radical associations.

In 1953, they attempted to have the bohemian Burck (who had neglected to formalize his US citizenship) deported.