Artist, teacher, poet and collector who favoured traditional techniques in drawing, printmaking and sculpture, the figurative and black-and-white. He produced powerful images which took a strong moral line on the harsh and cruel aspects of twentieth-century life, such as the Holocaust. He said that “of overwhelming importance to my art” is “the continuum of human life – that is what makes art sublime.” Baskin was born in Brunswick, New Jersey, America, son of an orthodox rabbi. Early in his teens wanted to sculpt, from 1937–9 being apprenticed to Maurice Glickman, holding a first solo show in New York in 1939, his work being given an Hon. Mention for the Prix de Rome. He attended New York University’s school of architecture and applied arts, 1939–41, from which he won a scholarship to Yale School of Fine Arts, 1941–3; served in the United States Navy at the end of the war and briefly in the Merchant Marine; was at the New School for Social Research, New York, graduating in 1949 (Tiffany Foundation Fellowship); L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, 1950; and Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, 1951.