Education Quote by Leonard Baskin

Survival is the blunt word that keeps Leonard Baskin's line from sounding like the usual artist-professor alibi. "I always felt I needed to teach to survive" admits something that polite art-world mythology tries to hide: the studio isn't a self-sustaining ecosystem. For an artist known for muscular woodcuts, severe figures, and an almost moral insistence on the body and the soul, the sentence carries a practical chill. Teaching isn't framed as noble service or fallback; it's oxygen.

The intent feels two-pronged. First, it's economic realism from a 20th-century American artist who came up when patronage was thin, markets fickle, and the "career" part of art could be humiliatingly contingent. Baskin taught for decades (including at Smith), and the line quietly rejects the fantasy that genius should float above rent. Second, it's psychological triage. "Needed" suggests compulsion: teaching as structure, a way to keep the days ordered, the mind engaged, the hand working when inspiration stalls or isolation curdles.

The subtext is also about authority and apprenticeship. Baskin's work often wrestles with inherited traditions - biblical, mythic, humanist - and teaching becomes a way to stay in the argument, to test conviction against younger eyes. There's a faint defiance in "always felt": not "I did", but "I knew I had to", as if answering critics who treat teaching as dilution. He turns it into a condition of staying alive as an artist: not despite the classroom, but through it.