Artists of the Fourteenth Street School:
Laning Finds Success and Community in New York City
"Art Students League Class, ca. 1890," Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
LANING’s JOURNEY FROM PETERSBURG to NEW YORK CITY
From 1923 to 1927, Laning studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York from 1927 - 1930 with Max Weber, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan, Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. (Local artists founded the Art Students League in 1875 due to their dissatisfaction with the lack of education in portraiture, sculptor, and composition.) 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 described the creative and academic path of his early twenties:
“It was 1926, during the ‘era of wonderful nonsense,” that I came to New York, a drop-out from Amherst College and enrolled at the Art Students League (where else?). I was twenty years old and an intellectual snob, and I chose to study with Max Weber (who else?). At the end of the year I went out to Taos, New Mexico to paint on my own, and discovered that away from Weber’s spellbinding presence I had nothing to go on. . . .
In the summer of 1929, I went to Europe. I went looking for Cézanne and Renoir and discovered that all the Cézannes and Renoirs were in America. But I learned that if I loved Renoir I loved Rubens more. I stood before the Descent from the Cross and determined I would be a mural painter.”
"John Sloan and his Art Students League class," ca. 1925
Art Students League records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Download here)
Peter A. Juley & Son, Photographer, "Kenneth Hayes Miller & class at the Art Students League," undated
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Download here)
FOURTEENTH STREET BECOMES LANING'S HOME
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.
"New Masses" [memorandum announcing the formation of the John Reed Club, New York City], 10-21-1929
Louis Lozowick papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
(Download here)
Audrey McMahon, College Art Association, New York City, correspondence, 09-15-1930
Konrad & Florence Ballin Cramer papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
(Download here)
"Protest Held by John Reed Club & Artists' Union," 1934
Louis Lozowick papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
(Download here)
LANING's INITIAL SUCCESS AND RECOGNITION AS A MURALIST
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.
LANING and THE "FOURTEENTH STREET SCHOOL"
From his studio on West Fourteenth Street in New York City, Laning served as a leading member of the “Fourteenth Street School.” Under the tutelage of Kenneth Hayes Miller, Laning and his colleagues embraced the Depression-era streets of New York City, finding artistic inspiration in its residents, visitors, and transients and documenting the area's mood of rebellion, restlessness, and despair. Writers, publishers, and radical social organizations gravitated to Fourteenth Street and the south of Union Square area as well; like the artists, they challenged the norms of American life and culture. The scenes they encountered were in stark contrast to a neighborhood that in the 1920s was a center of commercial activity for working and middle class folks. In short, the Fourteenth Street School artists exposed the grim realities of “a poor man’s Fifth Avenue.” Collectively, the artists, writers, and social activists moved away from bright palettes for their art and literature and toward darker tones and themes. The "everyday" person on the street and their activities served as noble models for these artists. Per Laning, “As the bread-lines formed and the ‘Hoovervilles’ sprang up, writers and artists turned passionately (if vaguely) ‘socialist.’”
The people, characters, and places described above inspired Laning's gritty, humane, and poignant work. Paintings from this period of Laning's career--featuring beggars, workers, a street orator, shoppers, revelers, and mothers, all within the confines of New York City--appear below.
Edward Laning, "Fourteenth Street," 1931
Tempera and oil on canvas, 30" x 40"
Photo courtesy of Museum of Modern Art (Download here)
Kenneth Hayes Miller, "The Fitting Room," 1931
Oil and tempera on canvas, 28" x 34"
Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Download here)
Reginald Marsh, "In Fourteenth Street," 1934
Egg tempera on board, 35-7/8" x 39-3/4"
Photo courtesy of Museum of Modern Art
(Download here)
Isabel Bishop, "Noon Hour," 1935
Etching on paper, 6-7/8" x 4-7/8"
Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Reba & Dave Williams Collection
(Download here)
Edward Laning, "The Beggars," ca. 1930 - 1932 [b/w photo]
Creative Art magazine, March 1933
(Download here)
Edward Laning, "Street Scene," ca. 1930 - 1932 [b/w photo]
Creative Art magazine, March 1933
(Download here)
Edward Laning, "Hats for Sale," ca. 1930 - 1932 [b/w photo]
Creative Art magazine, March 1933
(Download here)
Edward Laning, "The Street Orator," ca. 1930 - 1932 [b/w photo]
Creative Art magazine, March 1933
(Download here)
Edward Laning, "Central Park Holiday," 1933 [b/w photo]
Creative Art magazine, March 1933
(Download here)
Edward Laning, "The Workers," Seventh Avenue, 1933 [b/w photo]
Creative Art magazine, March 1933
(Download here)
Edward Laning, "The Mothers," Central Park, 1933 [color photo]
Creative Art magazine, March 1933
(Download here)