The Fourteenth Street School:

     Upon his arrival from Europe, Laning returned to the Art Students League in New York City to study with Kenneth Hayes Miller, despite the fact that he “had resisted Miller’s influence for three years and had been outspokenly hostile to him at the League.” Miller provided his students with classical art training that served as a foundation for their vision of contemporary art.  During this time, Laning took a studio at 145 West Fourteenth Street, near the studios of Miller, Isabel Bishop, and Reginald Marsh; the group socialized together and critiqued each other’s work.  After two years in Miller’s class, Laning accompanied Miller and Bishop on a tour of art galleries in London, Paris, and Madrid.  In 1932, Miller turned over his class to Laning.  (Laning would ultimately teach at the Art Students League from 1932 - 1933, 1945 -1950, and 1952.) 

     During 1932 Laning continued teaching at the Art Students League and served on the local board of the John Reed Club’s newly formed art school; the Club occupied two floors of a loft building on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village.  The first John Reed Club was founded in New York City in 1929.  After its formation local chapters were established across the country, seeking writers, artists, and intellectuals with a Marxist slant; the Clubs lasted until 1935.  (See the Constitution for the New York City chapter from the Louis Lovowick papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)  

     In his article “The New Deal Mural Projects” from the 1972 publication, The New Deal Arts Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, edited by Francis V. O’Connor, Laning recalled his lukewarm reaction to the Club and radical social thought in general:

“I attended meetings of the club for a while in the hope that my work would gain a deeper social content, but I never heard a relevant word. . . . Up at the table the officers (honest-to-Godless Reds, I presumed) harangued the meeting in an effort to persuade someone to go out to a plumber’s union meeting in Canarsie to give a chalk talk.  I decided that John Reed’s table was all the John Reed Club possessed, and I departed in boredom and frustration. . . .  My own notions of form and content in painting owed nothing to these ‘leftwing” associations, nor even to Marx and Lenin, though I tried unsuccessfully to read Das Kapital.”

     In late 1932, Laning received art project assignments courtesy of a work relief program administered from the College Art Association on 57th Street.  However, due to two Oklahoma oil wells that Laning and his sister owned–thanks to the foresight of “Papa” Smoot–he suffered less economic deprivation than his colleagues. 

     In 1933, Laning experienced his first taste of professional success.  He was invited to join and exhibit at the [F. Valentine] Dudensing Gallery, dubbed by a leading art critic as “the temple of modernism.”  The Whitney Museum of American Art also invited Laning to exhibit at the first Whitney Annual.  And with much passion, Laning recalled: “I was invited to join the prestigious [American] Society of Painter, Sculptors, and Gravers.  I had arrived! I was part of the Art World!  I got married [to fellow Art Students League member and painter, Mary Fife].  I moved into a big skylight studio in Greenwich Village.  My only unrealized ambition was to be a mural painter, and lacking a wall to paint, I embarked on a series of big panel scenes of New York life.”    

     In the March 1933 issue of Creative Art magazine, Laning received praiseworthy notice via two feature articles.  Reginald Marsh, Laning's Fourteenth Street School colleague, offered the following thoughts about his friend in the article, "What I See in Laning's Art."

"Of the newcomers exhibiting recently in the New York Galleries, Edward Laning, twenty-six years old, Middle-west American, is producing works of no little merit.  He is singing The Sidewalks of New York to the tune of the Italian Renaissance--the national anthem of Fourteenth Street. . . . His drawing is flowing and sensitive to the contours of the forms.  It has, too, a kind of ornate baroque elegance. . . . In his more recent work he has grouped his figures and objects more skillfully and powerfully, with greater relief and an ordering of events that results in a completely satisfying dramatic effect."

     In the same article, Marsh offered an assessment of Laning as a mural artist:

"Laning has developed a very distinguished mural form.  It is his notion to make effective as sculpture all the objects in the picture.  These objects are arranged in greatest care into a logical and varied design, with the proper adjustments to create an organic entity.  They have very much the same completeness as one finds in old coins and medals."

     On April 6, 1933, the New York Times discussed the burgeoning muralist under the headline, "Edward Laning, Disciple of Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reveals a Flair for Murals."  To be fair, the columnist, Edward Alden Jewell, a much respected art critic and magazine editor, judged Laning as "unquestionably one of the most gifted of the current crop of Miller fledglings" but questioned if Laning had "accomplished enough in his own right to elicit more than the encomium 'promising.'"  Even as Jewell contends that Laning's recent work has yet to "emancipate" him from his master (Miller), he does state:

"That Laning has a genuine flair for mural work is patent . . . . The artist is still very young, still in his twenties.  When he has succeeded in digesting Miller as Miller long ago conscientiously digested Renoir, Rubens, and the Italian Renaissance, then he will doubtless graduate with honors from the famulus [servant] class."

     In early 1934, the New York Public Works of Art Project asked Laning to make designs for four large wall spaces in the New York Public Library; his proposal went nowhere at that time.  Laning then joined the new Midtown Gallery on Fifth Avenue, a cooperative gallery where artists would pay $10 a month to exhibit their work.  Turning again to Laning’s memoir mentioned above: “My recollections of the next year, 1934 - 1935, are very hazy.  I know that sometime in 1934 I went broke like nearly everybody else.  The oil wells went dry and word came from Illinois, ‘That’s all there is; there isn’t any more.’”  

     Perhaps the tide would turn for Laning as an artist and muralist in 1935.