A biography for Leonard Baskinhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“I think the leaders inevitably express the people they are leading.”
“I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.”
“I always felt I needed to teach to survive.”
“But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest.”
“Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.”
“Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art.”
“Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.”
“It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.”
“I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.”
“The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”