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Leonard Baskin, 77, one of America's leading sculptors and a graphic artist whose works include a bas relief of Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1945 funeral procession at the FDR Memorial in Washington, died June 3, 2000. In his Holocaust Memorial sculpture--a seven-foot-high seated figure, heavily robed and bowed in sorrow, with a fist over its face and a hand raised to the sky--Mr. Baskin dramatized the suffering and misery of war. The sculpture is on the site of the First Jewish Cemetery in Ann Arbor, Mich. He also made woodcuts, prints, watercolors and book art, and his works have been displayed and are part of the permanent collections at many of the world's leading galleries and museums, including the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Sculpture Gardens, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, British Museum and Vatican Museum. One of five artists commissioned to create various sections of the FDR Memorial, which was dedicated in 1997, Mr. Baskin designed a 30-foot-long bas relief of the president's funeral procession with the coffin on a caisson followed by people with heads bowed and hands reaching for each other in search of comfort. "I tried to show the deep sorrow of the people," he once said. "People were overwhelmingly moved. This patrician had such a touch for the common man." The son of an orthodox rabbi, Mr. Baskin was born in New Brunswick, N.J. As a boy he attended what he once called a "dark, medieval" yeshiva in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He would describe himself later in life as an atheist, but religious themes as well as mythological symbolism, literature, history and images of human nature would figure prominently in his art throughout his career. He studied art at Yale University, and while a student there in 1942 founded the Gehenna Press, taking the name from a line in John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost": "And black Gehenna call'd, the type of Hell." Over the next half-century, this would become acknowledged by many as one of the most important and comprehensive art presses of the world. In 1992, a 50-year retrospective of Gehenna Press books toured the country, including a major exhibition at the Library of Congress. For most of his career, Mr. Baskin worked at his studio in Leeds, Mass., while teaching art at Smith College in Northampton, from 1953 to 1974, and later at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., from 1984 until 1994. He employed traditional techniques of carving, modeling and casting throughout his career, and he became known as a pioneer of large-scale printmaking. He also became known as a master of the woodcut and the etching and as craftsman of superb control. In an era of abstract art, Mr. Baskin remained constant to the figurative, and his themes ranged from the mythical to the mundane. "Human beings have not changed," he once observed. "Everything that surrounds them admittedly has changed . . . but not basic human life. No matter how fast we go, we still function as physical beings. That is the overwhelming importance to my art." Many found his art macabre and grotesque, suggestive of disease, war and death. He often used birds as a metaphor for human rapacity. "My sculptures are memorials to ordinary human beings, gigantic monuments to the unnoticed dead: the exhausted factory worker, the forgotten tailor, the unsung poet. . . . Sculpture at its greatest and most monumental is about simple, abstract, emotional states, like fear, pride, love and envy. . . . Over the years, I have developed a series of images of predatory birds and vicious human beings as well as producing a bizarre motley of iconic devices that say . . . Baskin." Among his honors were the Gold Medal of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, the Special Medal of Merit of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Gold Medal of the National Academy of Design.
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