page_title: Leonard Baskin
section_title: Major work
hierarchical_section_title: Leonard Baskin / Major work
caption_attribution_description: Leonard Baskin´s Isak, Marabouparken, Sundbyberg, Sweden
context_page_description: Leonard Baskin was a prize-winning American sculptor, draughtsman and graphic artist, as well as founder of the Gehenna Press. One of America's first fine arts presses, it went on to become "one of the most important and comprehensive art presses of the world," often featuring the work of celebrated poets, such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, James Baldwin side by side with Baskin's bold, stark, energetic and often dramatic black-and-white prints. Called a "Sculptor of Stark Memorials" by the New York Times, Baskin is also known for his wood, limestone, bronze, and large-scale woodblock prints, which ranged from naturalistic to fanciful, and were frequently grotesque, featuring bloated figures or humans merging with animals. "His monumental bronze sculpture, The Funeral Cortege, graces the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C."
context_section_description: A committed figurative artist, and the son and brother of rabbis, Baskin's work often focused on mortality, Judaism, the Holocaust and other angst-ridden themes. Repeating a Baskin quote first published in Time magazine, the New York Times' Roberta Smith cites it to explain Baskin's allegiance to figurative work and respect for tradition, which was at odds with the abstract expressionist movement that dominated modern art for many decades of his life, and which he firmly rejected:
  Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. Glorious in defining our universal sodality and in defining our utter uniqueness. The human figure is the image of all men and of one man. It contains all and can express all.
  As a young man, at the height of the flowering Boston Expressionist movement centered around the city's  Boris Mirski Gallery, Baskin had his first major solo exhibition there in 1956, on the heels of being one of 11 artists featured in the opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery.  He would go on to participate in another 40 exhibitions. Within a decade, he was featured in the 1966 documentary "Images of Leonard Baskin" by American filmmaker Warren Forma. In 1972, Baskin won a Caldecott honor for his illustrations of Hosie’s Alphabet, written by his wife, Lisa, and sons Tobias and Hosea, and published by Viking Press. In 1994, he received one of his most important commissions for a 30-foot bas relief for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and a bronze statue of a seated figure, also erected in 1994, for the Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
caption: Leonard Baskin, Isak, Marabouparken, Sundbyberg, Sweden
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