[4] 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].

[6] Burck was close friends with Alexander Calder, Whittaker Chambers (husband of ASL classmate Esther Shemitz),[7] 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.

[8] 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.

[10] 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.

[13] 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.

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.

[2] 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.

[31] His evocative portrait of Hugh Hefner, the smoke from Hef's pipe forming a group of writhing bodies, hung in the Playboy mansion in Chicago.

[32][33] His work is part of the "Capital and Labor" portion of the Library of Congress online exhibit Life of the People: Realist Prints and Drawings from the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Collection, 1912–1948.

[34] According to art historian Andrew Hemingway, "Burck was singled out for special treatment in 1935 when the Daily Worker published a 250-page volume of his cartoons under the title Hunger and Revolt.

[3][4] (In addition, Hemingway notes, "Within the John Reed Club Burck had a reputation as a formidable polemicist who was widely read in the 'history and theory of art.'

His occasional pieces in the Daily Worker certainly show him as a capable writer, and in 1935 he published an article "For Proletarian Art" as part of a debate in the American Mercury.