Biography

Lee Mullican was born in 1919 in Chikasha, Oklahoma. He died in 1998, in Santa Monica, California. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1942. Mullican has shown his work at various venues, including the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work is included in numerous public collections such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mullican’s work was much underappreciated until his retrospective exhibition in 2005-2006 organized by the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. After the LACMA exhibition, the desirability of his work increased tremendously. This would be the first work by the artist to enter SJMA’s collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2006)

Born in 1919 in Chikasha, Oklahoma, Mullican was introduced to art by his mother, an amateur painter. After establishing his own studio while attending the University of Oklahoma, Mullican briefly attended the Kansas City Art Institute before being drafted in 1941. While in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he was assigned to draw maps based on aerial photographs, which would later influence his artwork. Mullican drew during his free time and also visited many galleries and museums in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New York. Another influence on Mullican’s artistic practice was his discovery in 1944 of the magazine DYN, which brought into focus his interest in indigenous art and Surrealism. Mullican moved to San Francisco in 1946 where he joined with the expatriate Surrealist painters Wolfgang Paalen (editor of DYN) and Gordon Onslow-Ford to form the Dynaton group, featured in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in 1951. The Dynaton ethos would inform Mullican’s art throughout his career. Mullican moved to Santa Monica in the early 1950s, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles and working until his death in 1998. Mullican’s work was much underappreciated until his retrospective exhibition in 2005-2006 organized by the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. [Bio from Juicy Paint Exhibition, input by R. Faust, 8/11/2010]

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