Lee Mullican: Works from the 50s

Shortly after the last of these paintings were completed, in 1959, Mullican won a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Roma. His works remain in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, MoMA Paris and New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, as well as several major family foundations. This selection of paintings by Mullican represents a unique opportunity for the collecting public to acquire specially sourced material that most collections do not include.

The artworks, hand-picked from the artist’s estate, feature paintings that have never before been exhibited as a group or, in some cases, at all. 203 Fine Art is pleased to have the opportunity to present this exhibit in Taos, New Mexico, a place of spiritual energy and physical beauty that inspired Lee Mullican’s artwork throughout his lifetime.

While the 40s were spent in war as an aerial topographer, Lee Mullican’s paintings from 1956 to 1958, made shortly after his move to Los Angeles, marked a subtle yet striking shift in his practice. During this time, his compositions begin to open up. What once felt densely packed and earthbound now lifts, breathes, and expands. Familiar patterns of fine, ridged lines, applied with the edge of a palette knife, still pulse across the canvas, but they gather more loosely, like constellations forming and dissolving in a night sky. Hints of blue emerge in place of the deeper earth tones of earlier works, lending an airier, more ethereal quality. These pieces offer a glimpse of Mullican in transition, experimenting with space, color, and form as he moved toward the more minimal, monochromatic paintings he would later create in the 1960s and ’70s.

By the 1950s, two legendary European artists were ready to move beyond their nuanced world of Surrealism– and they wanted Lee Mullican to come with them. When Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford left their Surrealist group in Mexico for San Francisco, CA, they gravitated to the work of Lee Mullican, who, unbeknownst to them, had been an avid subscriber to Paalen’s art magazine Dyn while living on the shores of Hawai’i. The intersection that emerged between Paalen, Onslow Ford, and Mullican was a devotion to primitivism and the otherworldly realms that cultures around the world had documented for millennia.

The collaboration between the three artists reached international fame in 1951 when the San Francisco Museum of Art presented their exhibition Dynaton. This solidified Mullican’s career, which was only just beginning, and led to the artist becoming known for his innovative technique of painting with a printer’s ink knife. A significant key to this process was automation, adapted and modified from the Surrealists’ beliefs to instead refer to Mullican’s meditative state that came with non-objective painting, allowing energy itself to permeate rather than thought. Combined with the rapid, sharp strokes of the printer’s ink knife, Mullican had opened the art world up to questioning preconceived beliefs around the boundaries of genre and ancient inspirations.

Since Dynaton, Mullican has remained a notable figure in art history. Coined with a chameleon identity, the artist’s travels were far and wide, reflected in his many eras of style and subjects. His approach to the canvas required a pristine state of mind, disengaging the senses from specific associations and letting go of instantaneous reward. While it was the Native American culture he was surrounded by during his childhood in Oklahoma that drew the most inspiration for the artist, he never copied nor transcribed the beliefs of which he was not a part of. Instead, he allowed his ways of looking at the world to be changed and impacted by what so many others refuse to see.