Wood Engraving Wednesday
Leonard Baskin
Today we present a few wood engravings by renowned artist Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) from Leonard Baskin The Graphic Work 1950-1970, published in New York by Far Gallery as part of its 35th anniversary celebration in 1970. Baskin, who with his founding of the Gehenna Press in 1942 was among the first American fine-art book printers, spent a good proportion of his professional life in the Northampton region of Western Massachusetts where he was a teacher, mentor, and inspiration to numerous American artists working today, especially in wood engraving, and as such was the dean of what we like to call the Pioneer Valley School of artists.
Death and the human condition are recurring themes in Baskin's work, as can be seen here. In his idiosyncratically formal, almost 18th-century style, Baskin remarked:
It is the special province of the Graphic Arts to be tendentious, to excoriate, attack and denounce (even rarely to praise), inventing scarifying images with specific and immediate purport.
The Graphic Works, one of many hundred of items donated by our late friend Jerry Buff (1931-2025), was designed by Leonard Baskin, typeset by the Stinehour Press, and printed at the Meriden Gravure Company.
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