The sucking infant lives to die in battle; the weeping mother feeds him for the slaughter

Jacob Landau was born in 1917 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He studied fine arts at the University of Arts in Philadelphia and lived in New York until he joined the army. After the war he continued his studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, and then moved to Paris, where he studied at L'Academie Julian and L'Academie de la Grande Chaumière. Returning to the U.S. he taught for three years at the Philadelphia College of Arts and from 1957 for twenty years at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1974 he was elected Associate Professor at the National Academy of Design and in 1979 he became a Full Professor. Having grown up during the Depression and the Holocaust, he delved particularly into the human psyche and drew his subjects from there, seeking to capture and communicate his views through the prism of inhumanity , man's violence to man. His work has been shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), in New York City and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, as well as internationally. In addition, he has received numerous awards and grants, including National Endowment for the Arts and Ford Foundation grants, as well as Tamarind and Guggenheim fellowships. He died in 2001 in Roosevelt, New Jersey.