A maverick artist of contemporary American portraits and nudes

August Becker is an American artist, born 1933, Columbia, S.C. and raised in Miami, Florida. After graduating from Miami High School in 1950, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. (BFA, 1954; MFA 1955.)

Becker won the Campana Memorial Prize at the open juried Chicago Show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955 for his painting called Tom Figure, and was acclaimed by Arts Digest, as a “sophisticated newcomer,” to the Chicago art scene.

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After serving two years in the US Army, Becker returned to Chicago where he worked briefly in advertising and taught at the Hyde Park Art Center. He lived in Florence, Italy from 1959-60, then took up residence in New York City where he taught at the High School of Music and Art and Pratt Institute, while earning a doctorate in Art and Education at Columbia University. In 1971, he joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii, and taught there for eleven years. In 1982 he returned to New York City.

August's art can be described as

• The nude and naked in contemporary American art: Heads and tails, the portraits and nudes of August Becker, genius of the anatomically incorrect.
• A maverick artist of contemporary American art - an International figure painter (the human figure)
• Heads and tails, the portraits and nudes of August Becker, genius of the anatomically incorrect, the figurative, the male figure, human form, and figures in space. 
• Penis Pride, Bottoms up, Bottoms out!