Leonard Baskin, 1922-2000, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and reared in Brooklyn, New York. The son of a rabbi, Baskin was educated at a yeshiva. Committed to art at an early age, Baskin had his first exhibition, of sculpture, at the Glickman Studio Gallery, New York, at the age of seventeen. He studied at Yale University from 1941 to 1943 and received his B.A. at the New School for Social Research in 1949. Baskin spent 1950 and 1951 abroad, studying in Paris and Florence. In 1953 he began teaching printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1974. During this period, he founded the Gehenna Press in Northhampton, which published prints and fine editions, particularly of poetry. He moved to England in 1974 and stayed till 1983, when he returned to America. These nine years were enormously productive, and besides sculptures, he created a fine selection of prints and paintings. Baskin became intrigued by Greek history, philosophy, and mythology at an early age, and this study inspired many of his sculptures and paintings. Other influences were early twentieth-century sculptors, notably Ernst Barlach.
Leonard Baskin was a writer and illustrator of books ranging from the Bible to children's stories and natural history. He was a watercolorist and a prolific printmaker. His prints ranged from woodcuts through lithography and etching; his subjects covered portraits, flower studies, and biblical, classical, and mythological scenes. Baskin’s sculptures, watercolors, and prints are in the permanent collections of most of the world's major art galleries and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Vatican Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Tate Gallery in London. Among Baskin's many commissions are a bas relief he made for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial and the Holocaust Memorial statue erected on the site of the first Jewish cemetery in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Baskin won many awards including the Gold Medal of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, the Special Medal of Merit of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Gold Medal of the National Academy of Design. For more on Baskin, see his biography on Wikipedia.
Leonard Baskin, "Distention," etching, 1965
Etching, 24 x 38 inches. Signed in pencil on lower right beneath left foot; numbered 82/115 in pencil in lower middle; title "Distention" in pencil on lower left. Printed and published by the Gehenna Press in 1965.
Purchased from the Kerwin Galleries, Burlingame, California, August 31, 1991.
The next five items are from the Laus Pictorum: Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Artists series, a collection of portraits of engravers, lithographers, illustrators, sculptors, and painters done as wood engravings, etchings, and lithographs. All were printed and published by the Gehenna Press. Laus pictorum means "praise of the artists." Baskin published a book entitled Iconology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), which reproduces some of the drawings in this series, along with an essay on each artist. Of the subjects of the prints here, only Georges Minne and Constantin Meunier appear in the book.
Leonard Baskin, "Jacques Gamelin," wood engraving, 1969
Wood engraving, 11 x 14, signed by the artist in pencil on the lower left; numbered CXLVI/CLXXV (146/175) in pencil on the lower right. Printed and published by the Gehenna Press in 1969. Part of the Laus
Pictor: Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Artists series.
(From a printed slip supplied with the picture, written by Baskin) "JACQUES GAMELIN 1738-1803 -- The most obscure of this company, an 18th century artist, Gamelin, a fair painter as far as I can tell, etched an Osteology of eccentric brilliance and bizarre power, virtually unique in the history of anatomical model books. He worked in Toulouse and it is my notion he deeply influenced Bresdin and Redon, whose family collected Gamelin's paintings, often of great and imaginary armies fighting in total chaos on an unknown Champs de Mars. In his book on the bones of man's body, he distorts the body in various grotesque poses, odd foreshortening, strange positions. Gamelin's book has several unrelated etchings, vignettes really, of skeletons dancing, playing instruments, drinking in a cafe, which beyond their novelty are densely and masterfully achieved. They precurse Bresdin and prove the only immediate and close source for Bresdin's works. An extraordinary artist who lives only in the pages of his uncommon book and in paintings lost in the still dimness of provincial museums."
Purchased from the Kerwin Galleries, Burlingame, California, February 17, 1991.
Leonard Baskin, "Charles Meryon," wood engraving, 1969
Wood engraving, 11 x 14, signed by the artist in pencil on the lower left; numbered CXXIV/CLXXV (124/175) in pencil on the lower right. Printed and published by the Gehenna Press in 1969. Part of the Laus Pictor: Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Artists series.
(From a printed slip supplied with the picture, written by Baskin) "CHARLES MERYON 1821-1868 -- "Meryon moved about in Paris and saw with cyclopean eye a vision of the quotidian become enchanted. His Eau-Fortes sur Paris [Etchings in Paris] displays the city's stoned visage dank with slime, muck, and grime. His city's quivering air is miasmic, laden with terror and doom. The etchings seem quite literal architectural studies, but Meryon was paranoid and his great telescopic eyes saw awry but subtly so. (Meryon was twice removed to Charenton [a mental asylum in Paris].) It was his particular genius to invest the ordinary with qualities of wonder and dread. See the great streamers of smoke and steam lifting away from The Morgue. What ghastly, steaming, burning, frying is this?"
Purchased from the Kerwin Galleries, Burlingame, California, August 31, 1991.
Leonard Baskin, "Constantin Meunier," etching, 1969
Etching, 11 x 14, signed by the artist in pencil on the lower left; numbered CXXIV/CLXXV (124/175) in pencil on the lower right. Printed and published by the Gehenna Press in 1969. Part of the Laus Pictor: Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Artists series.
(From a printed slip supplied with the picture, written by Baskin) "CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 1831-1906 -- When Rodin, in artisan-guise, labored for Carriere-Belleuse in Brussels, there is considerable likelihood that he encountered Meunier, the great sculptor. Consecrating his genius in veneration of Belgium's workers, the miners, puddlers, and steelmen, Meunier invested the toilers in the Borinage deadliness with a Donatello-like grandeur. But they remain late 19th century workers droned in the pits which Leopold the Grotesque's capitalism had magnanimously dug for them. The miners in turn loved Meunier for he was their genius loci. He is singular in seeing in proletarian man the great tragic figure of the 19th century. (And not the clown, who is classless, and whose dismally sad state is no one's fault.)
That he fashioned sculptures of grandeur, eschewing all sentimentality, is testimony of his deep compassion and sculptural brilliance. Meunier is but little known, but his monumental vision of labor and the men at the gyres of life will endure."
Purchased from the Kerwin Galleries, Burlingame, California, August 31, 1991.
Leonard Baskin, "Georg Minne," wood engraving, 1969
Wood engraving, 11 x 14, signed by the artist in pencil on the lower left; numbered CXLVI/CLXXV (146/175) in pencil on the lower right. Printed and published by the Gehenna Press in 1969. Part of the Laus Pictor: Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Artists series.
From Baskin's Iconologies, pp. 13-31: "Is it odd that Flanders, a fragment of European geography, should play so continuous and central a role in its artistic development? . . . Consider some of the artists, Ensor, Permecke, Meunier, Spillaert, Khnopf, Rops, van Russelberghe, et alia and the subject of this note and accompanying wood-engraving, Georg Minne. Minne is unlike any other sculptor of the period; the swerving and curving fripperies and flippancies of Art Nouveau, endlessly damaging in other artists, grant him added means to achieve his most telling work: the kneeling youths, blesses, and in many individual sculptures. His use of the Art Nouveau style is supremely personal and subtle in the extensions and retractions of swollen forms; he is sensitive in defusing the curvilinear; Minne is not a decorative sculptor and thus escapes the ravaging destructiveness of sinuosity; he is curt in his use of the mellifluous style. Minne's capital work is, no doubt, his ring of kneeling youths . . . in the immense Ghentian square . . . . The harmonies that wend from figure to figure are near musical for subtlety of nature and variation of mode: there is a quality in this work, which I can but dimly and I fear simplistically call religious . . . . And he made interesting and original woodcuts."
Purchased from the Kerwin Galleries, Burlingame, California, February 17, 1991.
Leonard Baskin, "Pictor Ignotus," wood engraving, 1969
Pictor ignotus is "the unknown painter."
Wood engraving, 11 x 14, signed by the artist in pencil on the lower left; numbered CXXIV/CLXXV (124/175) in pencil on the lower right. Printed and published by the Gehenna Press in 1969. Part of the Laus Pictor: Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Artists series.
(From a printed slip supplied with the picture, written by Baskin) "PICTOR IGNOTUS -- Here see the sly artist sloping off to an encloaked anonymity. After a masterful gesture disappearing into a beguiling mist. He paints those paintings so tantalizingly like so and so, absurdly in manner like thus and thus. His works circulate like Annais under false names or rest majestically in museums in misattribution. What jape of fortune stayed the signature, the place, the date? A mute Apelles? A paradox, for painters, like all egocentered inventors, classically need to be known. One must assume that throughout art's history, a few (despite art historianish furor for unmasking the anonymous) preferred cowls, mantles, masks, and the deep-walled shadow."
Purchased from the Kerwin Galleries, Burlingame, California, August 31, 1991.
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