WWII Service and Beyond:

     From 1941 to 1943, Laning served as an Art Instructor at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City.  In 1943, he was drafted as an artist correspondent and traveled to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, and Italy to create paintings of war scenes for Life magazine.  His paintings depicted the desolate and dismal condition of the combat areas, including constant fog and dampness.  Of his painting, "Attu [Island]" (in the Aleutian Islands; see below), Laning stated: 

"At Attu, after the battle was over, one of the veteran regiments was replaced by a new outfit and the men who had been through the fight took the new men through a reenactment of various phases of the Attu campaign. . . .  When I returned to Massacre Bay the chaplain told me that the most dramatic incident he had witnessed during the fighting occurred here.  The [Japanese] had taken up their position on the heights, as they did throughout their fighting at Attu.  Our men had to fight their way up the mountain to get at them.  Hidden behind the fog the [Japanese] could see us without being seen.  One of our men decided there was nothing for it but to cross the open snow and hunt them out.  Halfway across they got him.  The chaplain said you could see the red streak down the mountain for miles.”

     After being wounded on the battlefield in 1944, Laning returned home with a Purple Heart and took a position as the head of the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design.

Guggenheim Fellowship and Annual Grant of American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1945

Head of Department of Painting and Drawing, Kansas City Art Institute, 1945 - 1950

Co-founder, Mid-America Artists Association, 1945 - 1950

Fulbright Scholarship for Study in Italy, 1950 - 1951 and 1951 - 1952

Assumed mentor’s Kenneth Hayes Miller’s post at the Art Students League of New York, 1952

Art Instructor, Pratt Institute, 1953 - 1956

Named National Academician by the National Academy of Design, 1958 

Art Instructor, National Academy Art School, 1960 - 1962

President, National Society of Mural Painters, 1970 - 1974

     In 1975 Laning began work on a mural for what was then the National Bank of Petersburg (now Alliance Community Bank).  As Laning struggled with a theme for the mural, a friend advised him, "I hope you won't make it about Abe Lincoln."  Laning responded with, "But what else is there?"  No matter the subject, Laning's work would capture his respect for the beauty and history of his childhood environment.  Most appropriately, Laning turned to his old friend Edgar Lee Masters for inspiration; Masters is featured in one end of the mural along with a tombstone engraved with Masters' name and a wreath and pink ribbon stating, "Homage from Edward Laning."  In further recognition of Laning's family history, a young Abe Lincoln--as a surveyor--appears at the other end of the mural.  Masters and Lincoln frame the true centerpiece of the mural, a horse named Peter McCue foaled in 1895 on a farm just west of Petersburg, famed for his speed and offspring.  

     At the conclusion of his dedication essay for the mural, Laning wrote:

"The pioneers may take possession of the land, but it is through the poets that the land takes possession of us.  These fresh savannas have been fertile in all ways; they have produced poets too, like Vachal Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters.  And think of that other enignmatical writer of poetry and his ironical words, 'The world with little note nor long remember what we say here.'  Ironically, because what Abe Lincoln said there is all we do remember of Gettysburg now.  And through his poetry we became at last the children, not of a Country or Section only, but of a Nation."

(Acknowledgment:  Information above from "Petersburg's Hidden Treasures," by Mike Kienzler, Illinois Heritage, April 2019)

In 1980, Laning came to Ogden, Utah, to oversee the installation of two 50 feet wide by 12 feet tall murals in the Grand Lobby of the historic Ogden Railway Station.  The northern side depicts the Union Pacific company coming from Omaha, Nebraska, and the southern side depicts the Central Pacific coming from Sacramento, California.  The figures in the images are modeled upon those that Laning employed for The Role of the Immigrant in the Industrial Development of America some forty plus years earlier.  Laning received a commission of $100,000 from the National Academy of Design of New York City for the two murals.