Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) American, Signed & Numbered Woodcut Print. Signed lower right. Numbered 170/200. Original labels on back include medium, date of print (1973), and title: "The Bard - Shakespeare." Additional labels from prior gallery with sale information and bio of artist. 

Overall: 23 1/4 X 16 in. 

Sight: 14 X 7 3/4 in. 

#2786 . 

Leonard Baskin was born on August 15th, 1922 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. When Baskin was seven the family relocated to the Jewish Orthodox section of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York. Having vowed to become a sculptor at the age of 15, he studied sculpting as an apprentice to Maurice Glickman from 1937 to 1939 at the Educational Alliance in New York City, and held his first one-man show there in his last year. He had many influences during that time including Ossip Zadkine, Henri Laurens, and Alexander Archipenko, as well as developing a fascination with calligraphy. He became primarily a figurative artist, and his work often focused on mortality, Judaism, and the Holocaust. Baskin studied at the New York University School of Architecture and Applied Arts from 1939 to 1941. In 1941 he won a scholarship to Yale where he studied for two years, and founded the Gehenna Press, which he ran for the rest of his life. One of America’s first fine arts presses, it often featured the work of celebrated poets, such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anthony Hecht, and James Baldwin, side by side with Baskin’s bold, stark, energetic and often dramatic black-and-white prints. Baskin served in the Navy during the final years of World War II, and then in the Merchant Navy. Afterwards he studied at The New School for Social Research, where he obtained a Bachelors in 1949. In 1950 he went to Paris where he studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, and the following year he went to Florence to study further at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Between 1952 and 1953 he was an instructor in printmaking at the Worcester Art Museum where he taught the artists Joyce Reopel and Mel Zabarsky. After that he spent the next twenty years teaching printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. His first wife, Esther, was a nature writer and mother to his son Tobias, and after she died in 1973 he left Massachusetts to spend time in England, seeking to distance himself from the pain of her loss. He eventually remarried to Lisa Unger and in 1984 returned to the United States to teach at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Baskin’s work is held by major museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Vatican Museums. He was the recipient of six honorary doctorates, and a member of various national and royal academies in Belgium, Italy, and the United States, winning numerous awards and fellowships which he often shared with collaborators through Gehenna. Baskin died on June 3rd, 2000 in Northampton.