Semblance of a Dream

Edward August Landon was born March 13 in Hartford, Conn., to Per and Matilda Landin, recent arrivals from Sweden. The youngest of three children he enrolled in the Hartford Art School while completing his studies, and is where he became involved with a local theater company. His Bohemian wanderings with the troupe inspired a deep affection for the theater, dance and music, all-important themes manifested in numerous examples in his future work. By the late 1920's, determined to become an artist, Landon set out for New York City. He naturally gravitated toward Greenwich Village where he attended classes at the Art Students
League, learning to draw from the figure and confidant that he could "figure the rest out for (him)self."

He returned to Hartford at the start of the Depression where he was befriended by Elisabeth McCausland. McCausland would emerge during the 1930's as leading scholar on contemporary American art, and included Landon in her circle of artists and writers who met regularly at her apartment. It was through this association that he was to meet Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keefe, Paul Strand, Arthur Dove and others associated with the most advanced currents in the modern arts. At twenty-two, Landon was well into an investigation of Surrealism and with McCausland's influence became an eager student of abstraction. Awarded a scholarship grant from the Guggenheim Foundation (1939-1941), Landon created a series of abstract geometric paintings included in the 1942 show at the Guggenheim Foundation.

During the latter 1930's and a student of the Art Student League, Landon made his first acquaintances with artists experimenting with silkscreen. As soon as he had learned the technique, Landon became so intrigued that he turned his back on paintbrushes and canvas in favor of the squeegee and stencil. Though Landon's formal style would change over the years, his anti-academic, non-conformist attitude would color his approach to art and the medium, as well as his approach to life. Uninterested in replicating brushstrokes, surface density or other characteristics generally associated with painting, Landon respected this new medium's inherent qualities which for him involved simplifying his compositions, hardening the edges of his forms and replacing the illusion of deep space with flat areas of color. Landon became a pioneer in the development of serigraphy (an original American method of fine color printmaking) and from the early forties until his death in 1984, he devoted the greater balance of his artistic expression to this medium. He was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Norway (1950-1951) where he introduced the process to European artists in Norway and Sweden.