The Jacob Landau Institute has given more than 300 of the late artist’s prints, drawings, and paintings to Monmouth University. Photo courtesy Jacob Landau Institute
May 20, 2008
The Jacob Landau Institute of Roosevelt has donated more than 300 works by the late artist to Monmouth University.
The collection of prints, drawings, and paintings will be on display on the university’s West Long Branch campus.
Landau, who died in 2001, won praise for his “humanist” approach to art, which explored the basic themes of human existence and morality, according to institute president David Herrstrom.
“Having been seduced by the endlessly inventive and exhilaratingly imaginative work, with its sinewy honesty that is Landau’s, it’s wonderful to know that his art has found such a fine and appropriate home in the Monmouth University galleries,” Herrstrom said.
The donated works include Landau’s Holocaust Suite and Meditation on Love and Death.
“We are honored by this gift, one of the most significant collections of art that the university has received,” said Scott Knauer, the university’s director of galleries and collections.
“It will be of tremendous benefit not only to our students and faculty, but to residents of the surrounding communities as well.”
Landau was born in 1917 in Philadelphia and studied at the Philadelphia College of Art. He received a doctorate of fine arts from Monmouth University in 1996, and spent most of his adult life in Roosevelt, where he was part of the town’s noted artistic community. His works are part of the permanent collections in numerous museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Landau also had major retrospectives at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton in 1983 and at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum in 1999.
Landau once described his objectives in art as advocating “the human, that is a revelation of the tragic, and as hope of transcendence.”
The donation brings Landau’s spirit “full circle,” said university president Paul G. Gaffney II.
“We are delighted to receive such a gift,” Gaffney said. “I vividly remember the recent exhibit of Landau’s work that Monmouth University hosted in 2007. We are honored by Jacob Landau through this gift from the Jacob Landau Institute, as we have honored him.”
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