Time & Perspective Quote by Leonard Baskin

Baskin’s remark lands like a quiet corrective to a century that treated drawing as either a quaint craft or a mere preliminary step before the “real” work began. Coming from an artist who built a career on the stubborn physicality of mark-making and the moral weight of the human figure, it reads less like trend-spotting than like a guarded relief: the basics are coming back, and with them a certain seriousness about seeing.

The intent is partly defensive, partly hopeful. Baskin is arguing for drawing as a form of intelligence, not an elective pastime. When he stresses “serious and meaningful,” he’s pushing against the modernist and postwar art-world bias that often prized concept over discipline and novelty over fluency. Drawing, for him, isn’t just technique; it’s a way to train attention, to measure proportion, to admit complexity. You can hear the implicit critique: when schools drop drawing, they’re not just cutting a skill, they’re cutting a mode of perception.

Context matters. Baskin’s lifetime spans the rise of abstraction, the boom of commercial image culture, and the art academy’s repeated reinventions. By the late 20th century, many institutions were reconsidering foundational training, responding to student demand, shifting pedagogy, and a broader cultural hunger for tangible skills amid accelerating media saturation. His “change going on” is also a wager that the hand still matters in an age increasingly defined by machines, reproduction, and spectacle. The subtext is faith that attention can be taught again - and that art can recover a spine.