FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
The new exhibition at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts, "Our Human Frame: 100 Years of Baskin," celebrates the centenary of the birth of Leonard Baskin and gives FAU community an opportunity to experience his art.
Open from February to June, the exhibit on the third floor of the Wimberly Library will be available through the Spring semester.
The exhibition includes selected highlights from Jaffe Center's extensive collection of Baskin's monumental woodcuts, books, and prints, paired with the works of Baskin's contemporaries, friends, and later his students, who founded their own presses, established their own voices, and in turn, taught a new generation the architecture of the page. Every visitor will receive a copy of a booklet of quotations from Leonard Baskin, printed from the type on printing presses in Jaffe printshop and bound by hand.
Leonard Baskin, born to a rabbi on August 15th, 1922, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was one of the foremost American sculptors and graphic artists of the 20th century. Baskin championed the emotive power of the immutable figure at a time when abstraction was in vogue. Though his work may seem macabre on the surface, Baskin held humanity and justice in high regard. Although he primarily considered himself a sculptor, Baskin maintained a massive output of prints, books, graphic art, drawings, monumental woodcuts, and broadsides throughout his career. Baskin taught printmaking, sculpture, and drawing at Smith College in Northampton and Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.
Baskin operated one of the longest-running private printing presses in the United States, The Gehenna Press, from 1942 until his death in 2000. Baskin's Gehenna is recognized as a pivotal contributor to the revitalization of fine art presses and private printing presses in the western world. One can hardly navigate 20th and 21st-century private press printing without recognizing the imprint of Baskin, and his long-time printer Harold McGrath, among the many young and eclectic printers producing new work. Baskin collaborated with contemporaries such as English poet Ted Hughes, American writer James Baldwin, and American artist Ben Shahn. He also illustrated classical works of literature, including William Blake's Auguries of Innocence and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
JCBA founder Arthur Jaffe collected Baskin's work extensively and was an avid supporter of his efforts with Gehenna. Learn more about the exhibit and Jaffe collection here.
