Lot 271
Leonard Baskin (American, 1922-2000). Three folio prospectuses including: (1) "Icones Librorum Artifices Second Series" with Baskin's woodcuts of Charlotte Guillard and Charles Ricketts, published by The Gehenna Press in 2000 (2) "The Gehenna Florilegium" with Baskin's woodcuts of a cluster of leafy branches and a crocus flower accompanied by Anthony Hecht's poem "Illumination" published by The Gehenna Press in a limited edition of 50 impressions in 1998. (3) "Drawings for the Iliad" with Baskin's woodcut "Diomedes of the War Cry" (1961) as the centerfold, letterpress by Gehenna Press, published by Herman D. Shickman for Delphic Arts. Size (Illiad when closed): 20" L x 13.125" W (50.8 cm x 33.3 cm) Size (open with Diomedes centerfold): 20" L x 26.25" W (50.8 cm x 66.7 cm)
The prospectus for "Icones Librorum Artifices Second Series" includes Baskin's mesmerizing portrayals of Charlotte Guillard and Charles Rickets. Baskin presents Guillard facing the viewer with her serious visage contoured in black on an orange ground. The text describes Guillard as "a great French Renaissance printer & publisher" whose subjects included theology and civil jurisprudence. For Charles Rickets (1866-1931) - a notable artist, collector, book designer, art critic, set and costume designer - Baskin featured a trio of visages in profile, each one in a diamond-shaped format and rendered in a distinct color palette - black and white, blue and white, as well as buttercup yellow, gold and black. The accompanying text pays homage to Ricketts, opening with an appreciation of his achievements in book design that claims he surpassed William Morris in this realm during the late Victorian age.
"The Gehenna Florilegium" includes poetry by American poet Anthony Hecht to accompany Leonard Baskin's color woodcuts of various flowers. The text boasts in part, "Hecht's poems explicate, expand & make plain the inner lives of these flowers & his original, inciteful & powerful verse probe into the complicated nature of their structures & denote the intricate character of their interconnective levels." AND "Baskin's woodcuts drive with plastic brilliance & xylographic inventiveness a vision of these miscellaneous flowers as continuance with their natural-history past & marvelously persuasive as being concocted in Baskin's mind & produced on hismanner, replete with tenebrous flashes."
The "Drawings for the Iliad" prospectus features Baskin's woodcut "Diomedes of the War Cry" (1961) as the centerfold. According to Princeton University Special Collections, Firestone Library, Graphic Arts Collection (where all the variations of publications reproducing Baskin's drawings have been collected): " Richard Lattimore's now-classic translation of Homer's The Iliad was first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1951. A decade later, the Press invited the artist Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) to produce drawings for a lavish illustrated edition, which came out in 1962. That same year a deluxe portfolio of 150 lithographs [seen at the top] after Baskins pen and ink wash drawings was published by Delphic Arts in New York, with the title Drawings for the Iliad. The first 90 copies included an additional three etchings, which were also distributed separately (two copies of each etchings) under the same title. If that isn't complicated enough, an exhibition of Baskin's drawings traveled to multiple venues in 1962 and an exhibition catalogue published under the same title.
Leonard Baskin was a 20th century "Renaissance Man" - a highly respected sculptor, printmaker, writer, and watercolorist. His prints included mythological, classical, and biblical scenes as well as portraits and floral studies. Baskin studied at Yale University from 1941 to 1943 and received his B.A. at the New School for Social Research in 1949. He also founded Gehenna Press which specialized in fine book production and taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts as well as Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts from 1953 until 1974. Baskin's artworks are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Vatican Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, the Tate Gallery in London, and other elite institutions. His noted public sculptural commissions include pieces for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial as well as the Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Baskin also received many prestigious honors, such as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gold Medal of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award. He was also honored with numerous retrospective exhibitions at institutions including the Smithsonian Museum, the Albertina Museum, and the Library of Congress.
Provenance: ex-private Bishop Family Trust collection, the Trust of the late Bill Bishop, a noted antiquarian with shops in Scottsdale, Arizona and Allenspark, Colorado, USA, acquired before 2010
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#176343
- Condition: "Icones Librorum Artifices Second Series" prospectus has central foldmark ; otherwise excellent. "The Gehenna Florilegium" prospectus is excellent. "Drawings for the Iliad" prospectus has small tear at bottom of cover page which does not impact the text or centerfold image. Also minor creases and stray marks at peripheries which do not impact the text or centerfold image. Inventory numbers are handwritten in pencil at upper left corners of back pages of each prospectus.
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