Leonard Baskin Quotes

"Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable."

"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."

"Almost everyone stops being an artist. Most artists don't become artists. But that's another discussion. What it takes to be an artist."

"But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest."

"I always felt I needed to teach to survive."

"I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money."

"I just finished doing a large Holocaust piece, a seated figure over seven feet tall. It's gigantic. It's going to Ann Arbor, Michigan."

"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 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."

"It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way."

"Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art."

"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."

"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."

"You have to want it overwhelmingly. You have to be an egomaniac. You have to have a little bit of talent. You have to have a massive amount of luck."