Leonard Baskin's figurative art stems from his deep understanding of artistic and literary traditions of both Western civilization and Judaism. The ancient themes that he derives from biblical, mythological, and historical sources forcefully convey contemporary human dilemmas.

The representational nature of Baskin's sculpture and graphics has been noted as an anomaly within the prevailing Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist aesthetic under which he matured. Yet certain stylistic conventions and thematic issues associated with these movements have found their way into his art. Baskin must also be identified with the vital current of figurative art that continued to develop alongside abstraction in the postwar years.

For Baskin, meaning can be expressed only through the human figure. His realism is indeed a reductivist one; he pares his forms just as he condenses content. Art historian Irma Jaffe notes mortality, grief, suffering, and homage as main themes that inform Baskin's works. What at first appears as a pessimistic vision is filtered into an expression of renewal and hope through the artist's manipulation of emotions. His own words plainly confirm his artistic struggle to find universal meaning in tragic subjects: "The human figure is the image of all men and on man. It contains all and can express all."

Monumental in scale, "The Altar" ranks as Baskin's most important wood carving. It is a highly refined synthesis of the metaphysical themes with those of the Hebrew Bible, all filtered through the artists strong Jewish background. Out of this large mass of wood emerges the figure of the trusting Isaac, stretched out upon the altar where Abraham dutifully prepares to sacrifice him. Isaac's back fuses with that of Abraham, who faces the opposite direction, emotionally overwhelmed, but relieved. An angel's wings sprout between the two bodies, protectively shrouding the supine body of Isaac. We recognize Baskin's frequent trope of giving his biblical or mythical characters his own features, thus making Abraham and Isaac-and by extension, the symbolically represented angel-into self-portraits. As such, Baskin's sculptural union of each of the three ancient protagonists-Isaac, Abraham, and the angel-projects the analogous tripartite conflicts within his and every person's psyche that Freud characterized as id, superego, and ego.

As Baskin learned of the German concentration camps in the 1940s and began to come to terms with his own mortality, his paintings, sculptures, and poems were preoccupied with the subject of death. Although for many years he collected images and newspaper clippings that related to the Holocaust, he did not confront the topic directly until the 1980s, when he created a serious of watercolors accompanied by Yiddish epigrams that embodied his emotions. In 1990, the Ann Arbor Holocaust Memorial Foundation commissioned Baskin to create a bronze monument honoring the victims of the Nazis. In 1994, this was sited on the campus of the University of Michigan. Baskin continued to delve into this subject and created a series of large-scale woodcuts, exhibited in 1998. The extraordinary efflorescence of his artistic interest in this devastating period of history and the proliferation of Holocaust museums and monuments is a logical extension of the attitudes that pervaded his oeuvre for nearly six decades. "The Altar" foreshadows Baskin's obsession with the Holocaust in his later, equally powerful works.