Edward August Landon

'Astral Comic' — Modernist Abstraction

1978

Edward Landon, 'Untitled Fantasy', color serigraph, 1983, edition 30, Ryan 214. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Edition 30' in pencil. A fine impression, with fresh colors, on off-whi...

Edward Landon, 'Arrangement with Blue Major', color serigraph, edition 40, 1942, Ryan 9. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Edition 40' in pencil. A superb impression, with fresh colors, on cream, wove paper; the full sheet with margins (3/4 to 1 5/8 inches), in excellent condition. Image size 15 x 9 3/4 inches (381 x 248 mm); sheet size 17 15/16 x 11 3/4 inches (456 x 298 mm). Matted to museum standards, unframed. 'Arrangement with Blue Major' was selected for the landmark ‘Artists for Victory’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1942. Impressions of this work are also in the collections of the Asheville Art Museum, Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium, Georgetown University (Special Collections), Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Rutgers University, Smith College Museum of Art, and the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. ABOUT THE ARTIST Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Edward Landon dropped out of high school to study art at the Hartford Art School. In 1930 and 1931, he was a student of Jean Charlot at the Art Students League in New York, after which he traveled to Mexico to study privately for a year with Carlos Merida. In 1933 he settled near Springfield, Massachusetts, painted murals in the local trade school, and exhibited with the Springfield Art League. His painting 'Memorial Day' won first prize at the fifteenth annual exhibition of the League at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. Landon became an active member of the Artists Union of Western Massachusetts, serving as president from 1934-1938. Landon acquired Anthony Velonis’s instructional pamphlet on the technique of serigraphy in the late 1930s. With colleagues Phillip Hicken, Donald Reichert, and Pauline Stiriss, he began experimenting with screen printing techniques. The artists' groundbreaking work in screen printing as a fine art medium was the subject of the group’s landmark exhibition at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in 1940. Landon became one of the founding members of the National Serigraph Society and served as editor of its publication, 'Serigraph Quarterly,' in the late 1940s and as its president in 1952 and 1953. The Norlyst Gallery in Manhattan held a one-person show of his prints in 1945. Awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1950, Landon traveled to Norway, where he researched the history of local artistic traditions and produced the book 'Scandinavian Design: Picture and Rune Stones...

Thomas Robertson, 'Composition #4,' color serigraph, edition 47, c. 1940. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Ed/47' in pencil. A superb, painterly impression, with fresh colors, on buff wove paper, the full sheet with margins (1 to 2 inches), in excellent condition. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size: 10 9/16 x 8 1/2 inches (268 x 216 mm); sheet size 13 x 12 1/2 inches (330 x 318 mm). An impression of this work is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. ABOUT THE ARTIST Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Thomas Arthur Robertson (1911-1976) was the son of an attorney. Although his father, a co-owner of the Arkansas Law School, insisted that his son study there, after graduating, Robertson enrolled at the Adrian Brewer...

Stanley William Hayter, 'Green Shade', color etching and scraper, 1963, edition 50, (only 39 printed), B&M 278. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered '1/50' in pencil. A superb, richly-inked, luminous impression, with fresh, vivid colors, on Barcham Green textured cream wove paper; the full sheet with margins (2 3/16 to 3 1/4 inches), in excellent condition. Printed: intaglio black-green, contact lumogen yellow, soft roller phthalo green. Scarce. Image size 15 7/16 x 11 5/8 inches (392 x 295 mm); sheet size 21 1/8 x 16 inches (537 x 406 mm). Matted to museum standards (unframed). Collection: The British Museum ABOUT THE ARTIST Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988) was a British painter and printmaker associated in the 1930s with Surrealism and from 1940 onward with Abstract Expressionism. Regarded as one of the most significant printmakers of the 20th century, Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17...

Untitled (SF129s) dating to c.1974-1976 is a mixed media, silkscreen monotype on handmade paper, 30 x 22.5 inches sheet size and estate-stamped verso (copy of Francis estate certific...

Leon Polk Smith (1906 -1996) holds a unique place in a long tradition of American geometric abstract painting. Born near Chikasha, a Native American territory later annexed by the U.S. as the state of Oklahoma, Smith’s parents, who were of Cherokee ancestry, raised him with both a strong sense of his heritage and an abiding respect for the land. Art would eventually draw Smith to New York where he would quickly embrace elements of geometric abstraction in his work. Many of Smith’s hard-edge compositions could be viewed as distillations of imagery drawn from the Oklahoma landscape...

Associated with the Minimalist art movement of the 1960s, Mangold developed a reductive vocabulary based on geometric forms, monochromatic color, and an emphasis on the flatness of t...

Leon Polk Smith (1906 -1996) holds a unique place in a long tradition of American geometric abstract painting. Born near Chikasha, a Native American territory later annexed by the U....