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"Tyrannus" 1982 by Leonard Baskin

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"Everyman" by Leonard Baskin

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"Angel of Death" by Leonard Baskin

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Leonard Baskin at Farnsworth Museum of Art

From the exhibition:

Baskin opposed all forms of repression as well as what he saw as culture's vapid materialism, what he called "a triumph of the trivial." His early learning was at a Yeshiva, an orthodox Jewish school devoted to traditional religious texts. Over his lifetime Baskin's reading interests were extensive, enriching his language and expanding his mind. As well as making beautiful books through his Gehenna Press, he was an avid collector of rare books and manuscripts—and of Renaissance bronzes, medals, postage stamps, drawings and prints, casts and bones of animals, ephemera, dried fruits and shells. His curiosity in the antiquarian, natural, and print worlds illuminated his art.

Baskin rejected Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, which were trending among his contemporaries, as being antithetical to the very meaning of art. He maintained what poet Ted Hughes called "the grand dimension of feelin€' in his figurative art, informed by literature and history, from antiquity to the events of his own lifetime. Having served in the Navy during World War Il, he knew Nazi oppression and felt its tyranny. He was affected by postwar photographs of prison camps and corpses and by the experiences recounted by survivors. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and its aftermath, further sensitized Baskin and many of his generation to the horrors of war and to the devastation of innocents on a global scale. His monumental woodcuts remind us of the vital need to challenge cruelty and destruction enacted by humankind.

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