Leonard Baskin American, 1922-2000

Leonard Baskin was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of fourteen, he watched a clay modeling demonstration at a department store and immediately decided he wanted to become a sculptor. Just four years later, he exhibited his first collection of works at New York's Glickman Gallery. Baskin began his art studies at New York University but later transferred to Yale University. However, he left Yale to join the Navy during World War II. He completed his degree at New York's New School in 1949 before moving abroad to study in Paris and Florence, where he immersed himself in Renaissance methods and traditions.

Afterward, Baskin moved to Massachusetts, where he taught at Smith College and began producing woodcuts, which he published through the esteemed Gehenna Press, a printmaking press he founded in 1951. Shortly thereafter, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

The son of an Orthodox rabbi, Baskin attended a Yeshiva high school, which profoundly influenced his later work, integrating mythological, historical, and Old Testament imagery into his art. His religious background led him to view humans as the center of the universe, with the human figure being his primary subject. Despite this, he maintained a grim perspective on life, often exploring themes of mortality and depicting his subjects with earnest, fanciful, and at times grotesque expressions. Baskin's engravings predominantly featured human figures rendered in solid black ink against white backgrounds, although he started producing color engravings toward the end of his career. While his early prints received critical acclaim, Baskin saw himself primarily as a sculptor, favoring materials like bronze, limestone, and wood, though he continued to explore the same subjects prevalent in his woodcuts. Due to his reverence for tradition and commitment to figurative subjects, Baskin's body of work stood in stark contrast to the abstract expressionists of his time, contributing to a significant collector base.

In 1974, Baskin moved to England to be closer to his friend and poet Ted Hughes, whose works inspired his woodcuts and with whom he collaborated throughout his life. Baskin returned to Massachusetts in 1983, where he taught at Hampshire College and completed commissions for the Holocaust Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. Over his career, he participated in more than forty exhibitions and received six honorary degrees. At the same time, his Gehenna Press published a rich series of woodcuts and over one hundred books, including works by James Baldwin and Anthony Hecht. Today, Baskin's art is part of numerous permanent collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.