I think the leaders inevitably express the people they are leading.

About Leonard Baskin

Leonard Baskinwas an American sculptor, draughtsman and graphic artist, as well as founder of the Gehenna Press (1942-2000). One of America’s first fine arts presses, it went on to become “one of the most important and comprehensive art presses of the world”, often featuring 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.

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I think the leaders inevitably express the people they are leading.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

The art schools… you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

Art is man’s distinctly human way of fighting death.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don’t think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life… nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

I always felt I needed to teach to survive.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don’t think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

There is, however, a change going on in the world. There’s far more interest in drawing now than there has been in a long, long time. Schools are beginning to teach drawing again in a serious and meaningful way.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

I think if you touch ordinary people, they’re simply ordinary people, the way they’ve always been. They work hard, they don’t have really as much as they should.

Leonard Baskin

American artist

Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

Leonard Baskin

American artist