UWM Libraries Special Collections

Wood Engraving Wednesday

Leonard Baskin

Today we present a few wood engravings by renowned artist Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) from Leonard Baskin The Graphic Work 1950-1970, published in New York by Far Gallery as part of its 35th anniversary celebration in 1970. Baskin, who with his founding of the Gehenna Press in 1942 was among the first American fine-art book printers, spent a good proportion of his professional life in the Northampton region of Western Massachusetts where he was a teacher, mentor, and inspiration to numerous American artists working today, especially in wood engraving, and as such was the dean of what we like to call the Pioneer Valley School of artists.

Death and the human condition are recurring themes in Baskin's work, as can be seen here. In his idiosyncratically formal, almost 18th-century style, Baskin remarked:

It is the special province of the Graphic Arts to be tendentious, to excoriate, attack and denounce (even rarely to praise), inventing scarifying images with specific and immediate purport.

The Graphic Works, one of many hundreds of items donated by our late friend Jerry Buff (1931-2025), was designed by Leonard Baskin, typeset by the Stinehour Press, and printed at the Meriden Gravure Company.

Zaporozhets’ za Dunayem (Kyiv, 1935)

Today’s staff pick is a rare libretto edition of Zaporozhets’ za Dunaem (“Cossacks Beyond the Danube”), published in Kyiv in 1935 by the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre of the Ukrainian SSR. This volume includes the libretto, press reviews, and commentary explaining a Soviet-era adaptation of the opera.

Originally composed by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky (1813-1873) and premiered in 1863 in Saint Petersburg, Zaporozhets’ za Dunayem is one of the earliest and most influential Ukrainian-language operas. Hulak-Artemovsky, who was also a performer at the Mariinsky Theatre, drew inspiration from Italian and German “light” opera traditions, combining them with Ukrainian folk themes, language, and humor. The plot reflects the fate of the Zaporozhian Cossacks after the destruction of the Sich in 1775, when some fled to the Ottoman Empire and later returned.

The 1935 edition reveals how the opera was reshaped in the Soviet period. According to the editors, elements of “national romanticism” were replaced with more comic, folkloric, and accessible material, better suited to a socialist audience.

Today, the opera remains widely performed and has largely returned to its original form. This volume offers a glimpse into one moment of its transformation—and into the shifting meanings of Ukrainian cultural heritage across time.

– Kate, Special Collections Graduate Art History Fieldworker