Leonard Baskin is admired for his intense figurative prints and sculptures. As the son of a Rabbi who grew up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn, Judaism and Jewish history are commonly featured subjects of Baskin’s work. His work captured the human condition and his figures often appeared trapped, tortured, or otherwise vulnerable. The figure in this sculpture, Study for The Prophet, is wrapped from head-to-toe, the garments obscuring all but a glimpse of the figure’s face. 

Baskin was especially respected for his work on monuments, including the bronze Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which features a seated figure symbolizing raw anger, and forgiveness and tenderness.

“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”.