Monumental color woodcuts were the most striking feature of the work of Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) displayed in a single large, light-filled room at the Delaware Art Museum. Although Baskin thought of himself primarily as a sculptor, the only freestanding sculpture included was Lazarus (1960), and his legacy will rest on the superb craftsmanship and expressionist power of his relief prints and letterpress books. The solo show was comprised of the seventy-six works created between1952 and 1974 that Alfred Appel, Jr. (1934–2009) collected during the 1960s and gave to the museum in 2009.

In her “Director’s Statement” in the catalogue, Danielle Rice correctly observes that her institution was a sympathetic context for Baskin. Baskin’s illustrated handmade books fit well with the Delaware Art Museum and its Helen Farr Sloan Library with their focus on American art and book illustration. Baskin’s collaborations with poets from 1974 to 1983 in England resonate with the Delaware Art Museum’s large Bancroft collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, which is similarly connected to English poetry. And nearby, the Special Collections Department of the Library of the University of Delaware contains significant holdings of Baskin’s book arts, which they regularly show in special exhibitions. As many rare book libraries as art museums house collections of Baskin’s work.

Heather Campbell Coyle, curator of American Art for the museum, organized the exhibition around three major themes appropriate for Appel’s collection: Iconic Figures, Literature and the Gehenna Press, and Portraits of Artists, each of which she explained in wall texts.

Throughout his career, Baskin created variations of monolithic male figures with the stance and gesture of archaic kouroi, as well as with the divine symbolic power of winged birds, birdmen, angels, and sybils—all metaphors for spiritual insight. Winged Icarus (1967) is a signature image for Baskin because of the dialectics of divine and human (or evil); inventive soaring genius and fallible, earthbound man; and the layers of meaning inherent in hybrid species. In addition, as the poet José Yglesias has noted in The Raptors: and Other Birds: Drawings by Leonard Baskin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), Baskin intentionally emulated the birdmen of Hieronymus Bosch and loved to create ravenous raptors which he called his “evil ornithology.” One might incorrectly conclude that Baskin’s demonic birds are less real or natural than John James Audubon’s depictions of wildlife. Baskin’s point, however, is that monstrous birds are as natural as Audubon’s more benign interpretations.

Peter Selz, who featured Baskin in his controversial exhibition, New Images of Man, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, discussed the continuing importance of expressionist and existentialist interpretations of the human condition which he contrasted to rational and classical canons. Selz wrote in the catalogue that, “in vehement opposition to what he calls the ‘subjective ambiguities’ of a great deal of contemporary art, Baskin feels that the artist is, above all, a communicator of moral ideas. . . . Like Francis Bacon, Baskin is preoccupied with the state of death and the act of dying” (Peter Selz, New Images of Man, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959, 35).

Lazarus is a prime example of Baskin’s leitmotif of vertical figures hovering between life and death. Baskin exploited such icons of metamorphosis and regeneration. In his watercolor interpretation, Lazarus (1961), he obscured the gravecloths that identify the man that Jesus revived (Gospel of John, ch. 11) and centered the composition on the round head and especially the closed eyes. In these, and in Death among the Thistles (1959), the faces appear to be death masks.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Baskin created two series of lithographs featuring nineteenth-century Sioux and Cheyenne people which emanated from his intense drive to counter not only the social injustices and disenfranchisement these groups had endured, but also racist images in Westerns (films). Wolf Robe—Cheyenne (1974), a watercolor, later and different from the hand-colored lithograph with the same title, communicates the chief’s resigned acceptance of defeat coupled with his resolute dignity; the combined emotions are typical of Baskin’s pictures of Native American leaders.

Just as Baskin leveraged the power of such iconic symbols as Icarus, Job, and Native American chiefs from widely various oral and written traditions, he also published and illustrated books of Judaic, Greek, Roman, European Renaissance, and modern literature. Although he was later expelled from Yale University for “incorrigible insubordination,” as he told Selden Rodman in 1956, while at Yale he discovered William Blake’s illustrated books, which inspired him to start the Gehenna Press in 1942. The press published over one hundred works including children’s books and many special portfolios. In 1994, the Library of Congress’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division organized a major exhibition to celebrate Baskin’s fifty years as founder, artist, and designer for Gehenna Press.

Not only did Baskin illustrate epic authors of the past, but he also worked with such contemporary poets as Sylvia Plath, her husband Ted Hughes, and Yglesias. In 1958 Plath wrote the poem “Sculptor,” which she dedicated to Baskin and included in her first collection of poems, Colossus (1960). Plath, Hughes, and Baskin shared interests in the macabre and in mythology. For years Hughes and Baskin exchanged works that prompted the other to create art around the same theme. For example, when Baskin sent the poet several pen-and-ink drawings of crows, Hughes wrote a collection of poems, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970), with a crow as the central character. Baskin’s descriptive Dead Bird [Crow] (ca. 1964) is one of hundreds of crows, owls, and ravens that he conjured in order to allude to their Old Testament symbolism of devastation. Baskin’s work often reflects his Jewish heritage in subtle ways; Baskin told Irma Jaffe that “he thought of crows as outcasts—not socially tasteful or acceptable. Maybe they are kind of a model for Blacks, Jews, Puerto Ricans, and everyone else who gets trapped in life. . . . I feel very Jewish, very Yiddish particularly, and so I think those crows in some sense are an expression of that” (see Irma B. Jaffe, The Sculpture of Leonard Baskin, New York: Viking Press, 1980, 127).

By creating dense, introspective watercolors, woodcuts, wood engravings, and sculptures of artists, Baskin paid homage to artists. Thirty-two works in Appel’s collection are portraits of artists (see Sidney Kaplan, “Portraits of Artists by Leonard Baskin: The Necessary Image: from the Iconologia of Leonard Baskin,” The Massachusetts Review 5, no. 1 [Autumn, 1963]: n.p.). In addition, Appel donated Laus Pictorum: Portraits of Nineteenth Century Artists Invented and Engraved by Leonard Baskin (1970), which includes fifteen additional portraits—ten wood engravings and five etchings.

Baskin widely varies size, media, and style in these portraits. His wit bubbles up in his watercolor drawing, Dutch 17th-Century Artist (1963), in which he used exaggerated foreshortening to transmogrify Rembrandt into a raptor—the artist’s nose pushed to a pointy peak at the top appears to be the beak of a predatory bird. Baskin’s woodcut self-portrait, AET 42 (1962), with its dramatic chiaroscuro and green skin tones, contrasts with the exquisite and delicate lines in dozens of small etchings and wood engravings.

Baskin’s self portrait and the six images of Eakins, which range from small wood engravings and a bas-relief to a monumental colored woodcut, are the only portraits of American artists in the exhibition. In Iconologia (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), Baskin wrote: “I venerate Thomas Eakins, America’s greatest painter. . . . It is not the paintings, despite the Rembrandtesque grandeur of their realism, that lifts Eakins apart; it is rather the perceptible actuality of his indomitable spirit, as he moved through his inhospitable world. . . . His forbearance was stoutly dignified at the braying of prurient prudes and he held fast against the onslaughts of privileged philistinism. His friend, Walt Whitman, said of him, ‘Tom Eakins is not a painter, he’s a force’” (quoted in http://www.rmichelson.com/Artist_Pages/Leonard-Baskin/pages/Thomas-Eakins.html). Baskin’s iconic and enigmatic heroes share with Eakins an indomitable spirit in the face of adversity, probably the most overreaching organizing principle of his oeuvre.

During the years that Baskin taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith College (from 1953 to 1974), Grace Borgenicht organized annual exhibitions of his work at her Madison Avenue gallery; Kennedy Gallery, also in New York, continued sporadically thereafter. Recent Baskin exhibitions like the Delaware show are organized to celebrate gifts of significant holdings of his works assembled by devoted collectors. In 2000, for example, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco mounted Leonard Baskin: Monumental Woodcuts, 1952–1963, comprised largely of gifts from Kenneth Shure and Liv Rockefeller. In 2003, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, staged Earthbound Flight: Winged Creatures in the Art of Leonard Baskin, to recognize gifts of prints and bronzes from Janet and John E. Marqusee and Israel Rosefsky. Baskin’s works are aesthetically pleasing and psychologically provocative, and their nuanced intellectual content reward scholars probing the humanist strain in mid-twentieth-century allegorical sculpture and images. Both Jaffe’s monograph and Alan Fern’s catalogue raisonné are more than twenty-five years old, and the exhibition Leonard Baskin: Art from the Gift of Alfred Appel, Jr. suggests that that their excellent scholarship should be brought up to date.

Artists and presses in Delaware created the beautifully crafted publication accompanying the Delaware Art Museum’s show in a conscious effort to honor Baskin’s interest in handcrafted letterpress limited-edition books on heavy, special papers. The text includes Appel’s “A Note on Baskin,” Rice’s “Director’s Statement,” and a catalogue of Baskin’s works that Appel donated to the museum.