LEE MULLICAN (1919-1998)

ANALYSIS OF THE ARTIST'S WORK

While occasionally diverting himself with other mediums, the greater body of Mullican’s work consists mostly of drawing and, usually aided by the palette knife, painting. Most of these meticulously-constructed canvases can be found in the Los Angeles area, the center of his exhibiting and teaching career.

A wide range of Mullican’s life experiences -- cultural, philosophical, and artistic -- have influenced his painting style. More than his college training, which yielded little beyond some technical development, it was Mullican’s term in the army that proved most artistically formative. Drafted into the war as a topographer, his training and eventual service in Hawaii and Japan demanded innumerable recordings of aerial photographs. This process, ingraining shapes and patterns from bird’s-eye perspectives into his drawing habits, cultivated his preexisting appreciation for naturalistic forms and abstract patterns. Additionally, access to museums and libraries of the East Coast and Hawaii during this time presented him the opportunity to ponder contemporary trends and thought in the art world, an art world effectively hidden from the Midwest. Specifically, his knowledge of (through the magazine Dyn) and ensuing friendship with Wolfgang Paalen exposed Mullican to non-western antiquity as well as to Paalen’s transcendent philosophies born out of the European Surrealist movement.

Absorbing these war-time developments while infusing them into his work afterward in San Francisco, Mullican began crafting his tapestry-like paintings in a style characterized by apparent contradictions. His paintings are at once naturalistic yet rigidly linear. Though relevant in their cosmopolitan exhibition environment, his paintings exude with the mysticism of ancient American cultures. Chaotically germinating but grounded in focal points, Mullican’s work is suggestive both of scientific phenomena (DNA strands, cells, etc.) and spiritual states of being. In an interview with Paul Karlstom he discussed his approach to painting in relation to these conflicts: “I was one minute grasping outer space, and the next minute, I was grasping what’s below the desert floor.”

Rarely is this element of paradox more evident than in examples of his Guardian canvases, completed between 1978-1980. Abstract patterns weave together vertically and horizontally, conjuring images of mysterious figures in a manner reminiscent of Pre-Colombian textiles. This historical influence --which Mullican admits to be a factor -- would seemingly locate the work within a particular time frame. However, the vague nature of the beings in the paintings, their lack of specific titles or features (along with Mullican’s insistence that they bare no chronological significance), seems at odds with the former conclusion; it speaks of universality.

At one point early in his career, a friend asked him to describe the mental process that occurs while painting in the studio. Never having considered this question, Mullican realized that each finished work represented a record of an unconscious process. “…I am standing on this particular metaphysical, almost unexplainable plane in my studio, the canvas is there before me, and it‘s in this attitude that makes the painting appear.” He relies upon his subjectively-rooted unconscious to achieve objective universal truths, again indicating the element of paradox as it applies to his studio mindset. That the ultimate end of any of his paintings relies upon contradictory visual elements is perhaps attributable to this equally contradictory approach.

AWARDS & AFFILIATIONS

1959-1960 Guggenheim Fellowship (painting)
1963 Institute of Creative Arts, University of California, Los Angeles
1964-1965 Fellowship, Tamarind Lithograph Workshop, Los Angeles, CA

COLLECTIONS

Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado, CA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA
Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM
Museum of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK
New York Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France
Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
Public Collections, Newport Harbor Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA
Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

DYNATON

In 1951 Lee Mullican and Gordon Onslow Ford, led by Wolfgang Paalen, collaborated on an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art entitled Dynaton. Prior to this event, Onslow-Ford and Mullican both migrated to San Francisco in the wake of World War II. Paalen, publishing his magazine Dyn in Mexico and painting during the war, moved to San Francisco with the hopes of energizing his marriage to Luchita. Paalen and Onslow-Ford knew each other in Europe and, endowed with the philosophies and aesthetic of the Surrealist movement, took the task of guiding the comparatively inexperienced Mullican.

Wishing to extricate himself of the confinements of surrealism or, for that matter, any style, Paalen sought a more limitless mode of creating art. Indeed, the Greek word “dyn” means “that which is possible.” The goal for Paalen, with the successive support of Onslow-Ford and Mullican in San Francisco, was to forge an ever-expanding art rooted in the timeless. As his first major group exhibition at such a critical moment in his artistic development, it comes as no surprise that Paalen’s Dynaton concept blended with Mullican’s pursuit of universal themes in his own art.

CATALOGUE OF WORK

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

Garden Four O’Clock. Oil on Canvas. 1947
Tendril World, Oil on Canvas. 1962
Untitled. Oil on Canvas. 1947-48

Smithsonian, American Art Museum, Washington D.C.,

Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or said returns at last to me. -Walt Whitman. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. Oil on Canvas. 1958

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Magic Night. Oil on Canvas. 1966

Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK

The Cardplayers. Oil, Pastel, and Acrylic on Canvas. 1965
The Rasberry Patch. Oil on Canvas. 1966

Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA

Weights of the Pacific. Oil on Canvas. 1957
Drift of October. Ink, Wash and Crayon on Paper. 1957
Untitled. Oil on Canvas. not dated
California Poster. Acrylic on Canvas, 1969.
Untitled. Crayon on Paper. 1950.
The Green Nature. Oil on Canvas. 1967.
Untitled. Watercolor on Paper. 1973.
Yellow Figures. Watercolor and Graphite. 1970.
Mountain. Lithograph. 1969.
Ancient Place. Watercolor and Graphite. 1973.
Santa Fe. Oil on Canvas. 1970.
Venice. Oil on Canvas. 1970.
Untitled. Oil on Canvas. 1949

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

Solstice Rider. Oil on Canvas. 1953.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Mullican, Lee. Lee Mullican: Selected Drawings 1945-1980. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 1999.
2. Halpern, Nora. Dynaton Before and Beyond. Malibu, CA: Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 1992.
3. Visions of Inner Space: Gestural Painting in Modern American Art. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, 1987.
4. Moderns in Mind: Gerome Kamrowski, Lee Mullican and Gordon Onslow-Ford. New York, NY: Artists Space, 1986.
5. Lee Mullican: Selected Works 1948-1980. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1980.
6. Los Angeles Collects Folk Art. Los Angeles, CA: Craft and Folk Art Museum, 1977.
7. Dynaton Re-Viewed: A show of three painters of the Dynaton Movement that was first exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco, CA. Anglim Paule Gallery, 1977.
8. Lee Mullican Interviewed by Joann Phillips: completed under the auspice of the Oral History Program. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA, 1977.
9. Paintings of the Inner World: An Exhibition of Color in Space. Los Angeles, CA: Herbert Palmer Gallery, 1975.
10. Lee Mullican Paintings: 1965-1969. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Art Galleries, 1969.
11. Lee Mullican. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1965.
12. Lee Mullican: Painting, Sculpture and Drawing. New York, NY: Willard Gallery, 1959.
13. Dynaton 1951: Jacqueline Johnson; Lee Mullican; Gordon Onslow-Ford;Wolfgang Paalen. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1951.
14. Lee Mullican; an exhibition of paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Art. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949.
15. U.S. Census, Birth Date, Marriage Dates, Children, Death Date. Accessed through RootsWeb.com.
16. Exhibition History. Accessed through HerbertPalmerGallery.com.
17. Interview with lee Mullican Conducted by Paul Karlstrom. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 1993.