Leonard Baskin

Expressionist artists, whether abstract or representational, emphasize the role of emotions in their art making, often employing exaggeration, fragmentation, and distortion. Sculptor and graphic artist Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) created heartrending images of an agonized humanity, except when applying his considerable skills to illustrating poetry for children. His fascination with other artists, the Bible, and Greek mythology is reflected in the themes he selected for much of his work.

The son of a rabbi, Baskin was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. From 1937 to 1939 he studied sculpture under Maurice Glickman at the Educational Alliance Art School in New York, an entity originally established in the late 1880s to assist Jewish immigrants. He attended New York University between 1939 and 1941, followed by two years at Yale University. His studies, however, were interrupted by service in the United States Navy during World War II. He finally obtained his bachelor’s degree from the New School of Social Research, New York, in 1949, the same year he turned to printmaking. He studied abroad for two years, first in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and then in Florence at the Accademia di Belle Arti. In 1953 he joined the faculty of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1974. He moved to Devon, England, for a period of nine years, to be near his collaborator, Ted Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate from 1984 to 1998 and husband of Sylvia Plath.

Always a figurative artist—of humans, animals, and imaginative hybrids—Baskin was out of step with the non-representational trends of his era. Furthermore, he remained a committed craftsman in wood, bronze, clay, stone, and with works of art on paper. While at Yale, he founded the Gehenna Press, which began publication in 1942 with a selection of Baskin’s poems, On a Pyre of Withered Roses. During the 1950s, Baskin developed his bookmaking and wood engraving skills, and created a distinctive typographic look for the press. Over fifty years, Gehenna Press, whose name derives from a phrase in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, produced over one hundred books and evolved from a one-man printing house to a nationally recognized enterprise. The Leonard Baskin and Gehenna Press Collection, 1952–1992, is located at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

In addition to his considerable achievements in the graphic arts, Baskin was a consummate sculptor. During the 1950s he began a series of haunting sculptures called Figures of Dead Men. Poet Archibald MacLeish said of them, “slack and unheroic as they are, they are heavy with grandeur. It is the grandeur of their mortality.” And despite their gloomy darkness, the figures offer hope: “But showing death, and showing also our own death, they show something more, something which is not of death but life, our own life. They show us that our life has changed by showing that our death has changed.” [1]

Among Baskin’s numerous public commissions are two presidential ones, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and the Woodrow Wilson Memorial, both in Washington, D.C., and the Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But he also delighted in portraying the proverbial man in the street: “My sculptures are memorials to ordinary human beings, gigantic monuments to the unnoticed dead: the exhausted factory worker, the forgotten tailor, the unsung poet. … Sculpture at its greatest and most monumental is about simple, abstract, emotional states, like fear, pride, love and envy. … Over the years I have developed a series of images of predatory birds and vicious human beings as well as producing a bizarre motley of iconic devices that say… BASKIN!” [2]

What distinguishes Baskin’s work most, however, is his view of humanity, heightened by such experiences as the holocaust and his love for children. In his illustrations for books such as Ten Times Better, Animals that Ought to Be, and Did You say Ghosts? by Richard Michelson, inventive creatures come alive and cavort across the page while elucidating the poetry. For his work as a children’s book illustrator, he received the prestigious Caldecott Honor award. In his acceptance speech on receiving a medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Baskin explained, “I have an exhilarating and oppressive vision of man as immutable, intact and practically unalterable. I could have walked with Socrates, hauled stones for Chartres, set type for Bodoni, and had my skull cracked by a cossock’s club in any innumerable pogroms. I am joined to that colossal continuum of man trusting through the centuries.” [3]

Notes:

[1] Figures of Dead Men, preface by Archibald MacLeish (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 1968), unpaginated.

[2] Baskin, quoted in John Payson, Leonard Baskin: Angels to the Jews (New York, Midtown Payson Galleries, 1991).

[3] Baskin, Leonard Baskin’s Speech of Acceptance on Receiving the medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1965), unpaginated.