Leonard Baskin American, 1922-2000

Leonard Baskin was a celebrated graphic artist, printmaker, and sculptor who is most known for his masterful, large-scale woodcuts. Baskin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953, exhibited at the Venice Biennale and MoMA, and later received sculptural commissions for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Known for his expressive, figurative prints and book illustrations inspired by the poet and artist William Blake, he was the founder of The Gehenna Press, one of the United States’s first fine art presses, which published the work of Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, and Ted Hughes.

The son of an orthodox rabbi, Baskin derived much of his imagery from biblical sources—along with mythology, literature, and history—and imbued his work with a distinct sense of mortality.