Lee Mullican

Lee Mullican was born in 1919 in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and died in Los Angeles in 1998. Reluctant to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and the current art world trends, he combined personal and cosmological content in his painting and sculpture. Considered to be a California artist, Mullican worked steadfastly in the Los Angeles area for most of his career, where he taught, painted, and quietly exhibited.

Upon his graduation from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1942, Mullican was drafted into the army, serving four years as a topographical draughtsman before moving to San Francisco in 1946. The process of visualizing shapes and patterns from a birds-eye perspective cultivated Mullican's appreciation for natural forms and abstract patterns and would later contribute to his signature style.

Along with the prominent Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford and the artist Wolfgang Paalen, Mullican formed the San Francisco-based group Dynaton, which established alternative visual imagery to Abstract Expressionism. The San Francisco Museum of Art gave Mullican a one-person show in 1949. At this time, he had nearly developed his mature style, all before the age of thirty. In 1959 Mullican won the Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing him to study in Rome. Afterward, he would join the art faculty at UCLA in 1961, where he would remain for nearly 30 years.

From the 1970s onward, Mullican began spending most of his summers in Taos, New Mexico, where he was considered a member of the group known as the Taos Moderns. Mullican had been to New Mexico on childhood trips, where he was exposed to and influenced by Native American arts and cultures. His resulting paintings would juxtapose the chaos of the natural world and the linearity of scientific empiricism.

A retrospective spanning fifty years of Lee Mullican’s work was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2006. Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.