American Monotypes from the Baker/Pisano Collection | Page 19

Leonard Baskin (American, 1922–2000)
Saint-Gaudens, ca. 1989

Color monotype with hand coloring, 5 x 4 in.
Chazen Museum of Art, gift of D. Frederick Baker from the
Baker/Pisano Collection, 2014.6.18

Well known as a sculptor and printmaker, Leonard Baskin was
a prominent member of the art scene in the mid-twentieth
century, both in the United States and in England where he
lived and worked for several years. As a student at Yale University, he founded the Gehenna Press in 1942—named after a
line from Milton’s Paradise Lost—which Baskin ran for fifty
years until his death. His forte was the human condition
expressed in his figural subjects and explored in various media
like sculpture and prints of all types: etching, lithograph,
woodcut, and monotype. Baskin completed many idiosyncratic
monotype portraits of artists, including Albert Bierstadt,
Thomas Eakins, Ernest Lawson, Eli Nadelman, Harriet
Hosmer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
NOTES:
For biographical information and a catalogue of prints pre-1984, see
Fern and O’Sullivan, Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin.

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