Leonard Baskin

Transfixed by a plasticene demonstration at Macy's in 1936, Leonard Baskin invested in some clay and immediately began modeling images from the Book of Knowledge. Sculptor Maurice Glickman became his mentor, and he attained formal art training at the New York University School of Architecture and Allied Art. In 1941, Baskin accepted a two-year scholarship to Yale University of Fine Arts. While at Yale, he started his own printing house, the Gehenna Press, which published more than 100 books. He published his own illustrations of obscure texts as well as his own writings. After World War II, Baskin obtained his Bachelor of Arts from the New School for Social Research in New York and, in 1950, studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France. He returned to Europe in 1953 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Baskin accepted many commissions, including the funeral cortege for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., and a seven-foot tall cast-bronze figure for the Ann Arbor Holocaust Memorial in Michigan. He created large wood block prints, watercolors, and sculptures in limestone, bronze, and wood.

Baskin won many awards, including the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Purchase Prize from the Print Club of Philadelphia, the Purchase Prize at the Brooklyn Museum Print Annual, the O'Hara Museum Prize from the Japanese National Museum of Tokyo, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Widener Medal, and the Gold Medal for Graphic Arts from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He was appointed Honorary Doctor of Humane Laws at the Clark University and Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts at the New School for Social Research, the University of Massachusetts, and the Portland School of Fine Arts. Baskin was a member of the Royal Academy in Belgium, the American Academy, the Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Accademia del Disegno in Italy, and his work is recognized in many private collections and museums, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vatican Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.