BASKIN, LEONARD

BASKIN, LEONARD (1922–2000), U.S. sculptor, printmaker, watercolorist, and illustrator. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Baskin was the son of a leading Orthodox rabbi. His earliest education was at a yeshivah in Brooklyn, where his family had moved when he was seven. After developing an interest in sculpture at age 14, he would attend day classes at the yeshivah and take evening art classes at the Educational Alliance (1937–39). Baskin also attended New York University (1939–41) and Yale University (1941–43). While at Yale, Baskin discovered William Blake. Impressed by Blake's role as a poet-artist-bookmaker, Baskin founded the Gehenna Press in 1942 and learned printmaking. The Press has published over 100 books, including Homer's Iliad (1962) and Dante's Divine Comedy (1969). Three years in the Navy during World War II temporarily curtailed Baskin's artistic activity. After the war he completed his B.A. at the New School for Social Research (1949). In the early 1950s he also studied in Paris and in Florence. From 1953 to 1974, Baskin taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He spent 10 years in England, in part to be close to Ted Hughes, with whom he collaborated on several books. Upon returning to the U.S., he taught at Hampshire College (1984–94). Baskin's frequent subject is the human condition, often fragile and anxiety-ridden, rendered in a manner that shows the artist's debt to expressionist artists. Although he first gained acclaim for his printmaking, sculpture was his favored medium. He preferred printmaking over painting, and especially the medium of wood, because of the more democratic nature of prints, which can be reproduced widely. He often worked on a monumental scale; his 1952 woodcut Man of Peace measures five feet tall and The Altar (1977), a wood sculpture depicting the binding of Isaac, is nearly six feet long. Many of Baskin's drawings and prints concern Jewish subjects. In 1974 he illustrated A Passover Haggadah, for which he provided watercolors, as well as hand lettering of much of the Hebrew text. Baskin received many important commissions, including a bas relief for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., and a seven-foot-tall bronze figure for a Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Baskin, Sculpture, Drawing, and Prints (1970); I.B. Jaffe, The Sculpture of Leonard Baskin (1980); A. Fern and J. O'Sullivan, The Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1948–1983 (1984). (Samantha Baskind (2nd ed.)