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 travelled 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.
In the late 1930s, Landon acquired Anthony Velonis’s instructional pamphlet on the technique of serigraphy. 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 travelled to Norway, where he researched the history of local artistic traditions and produced the book ''Scandinavian Design: Picture and Rune Stones, 1000 B.C. to 1100 A.D.''. He also taught serigraphy and organised print exhibitions, including a show of his own work at the Unge Kunstneres Samfund in Oslo. In Stockholm, Sweden, Landon lectured on serigraphy under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. He exhibited with the National Serigraph Society (1940-60), the American Colour Print Society (1945-65), the Boston Printmakers (1955-70), and the Northwest Printmakers (1950-60). The Philadelphia Print Club sponsored a solo show of his work in 1953.
Edward Landon''s serigraphs are included in major American and International museum collections, including the Bibliotheque National, Paris; Hood Museum of Art (Dartmouth); Moderna Museet, Sweden; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Turku Museum, Finland; Victoria and Albert Museum, England; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; British Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art; Cincinnati Museum of Art; National Museum of American Art; Portland Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; US Library of Congress; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Yale University Art Gallery.
