In 1969, Leonard Baskin was the fourth graphic artist, after Reginald Marsh, Ben Shahn and George Grosz, to be awarded a Gold Medal by the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.¹ He was a two-time recipient of the Tiffany Fellowship, received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was ultimately awarded six honorary doctoral degrees. According to the New York Times, Baskin was also the first American artist given the honor of an exhibition by the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria. ² In fact, Baskin and his work were honored, internationally, again and again.

Baskin established The Gehenna Press, while in college. Through it, he printed over 100 books.

Baskin’s sculpture, watercolors, and prints have been purchased or otherwise acquired by many major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Vatican Museum, the Smithsonian Institute and the Tate Gallery in London.

He was awarded commissions to create a bas relief for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial and a Holocaust Memorial statue in Ann Arbor, Michigan. ³

 The article begins thus:

I recently told the little reprobate who lives upstairs about the hidden images I had found in the adjacent piece of art (Figure 1: TYRANNVUS), created by Leonard Baskin.^{1, 2}

I recently pointed out the hidden images I had found in my TYRANNVS woodblock print on rice paper, created by artist, Leonard Baskin, to the little reprobate who lives upstairs. ⁴

“That ain't art,” said the kid, “it’s a raw shark.”

Raw shark? Sushi?

No.

So maybe he meant that the image exuded the ruthless power and danger of a shark. TYRANNVS does appear “in the raw.”

Nope. That wasn’t it, either. The kid said “Rorschach,” not “raw shark.”

His point: TYRANNVS – and perhaps, by extension, much of Baskin’s graphic output – is actually a sort of Rorschach blot, capable of exposing a viewer’s unconscious interests and concerns. ⁵ By my own admission, I was seeing things that, apparently, no one else had seen.

So is it possible that the images secreted in this print – and others – are simply products of an overactive imagination? Sure.

The question is, whose imagination? Leonard Baskin’s or my own? See and judge for yourself.

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