LEE MULLICAN: The Fifties 28 April 2016 – 4 June 2016
Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC
Circus, 1956 Oil on canvas 30 x 50 in.
AN INTRODUCTION BY MATT MULLICAN How Is He Painting?
My father had a decision to make after World War II: go east to New York or head west to San Francisco? His friend Jack Stauffacher, whom Lee served with in the army, thought that my father would enjoy the City By The Bay. My father took his advice and moved to what Lee would eventually call his “Paris.” Filled with artists, my dad found himself in a new world of possibilities and one day, while visiting Jack at his printing press (The Greenwood Press), my father noticed one of Jack’s tools was a knife to apply ink to the rollers of the press. My father observed this process and, being the inventor that he was, experimented with this knife to paint a picture. He would pull the knife over the paint, leaving a ridge of color on the edge of the blade and then press the edge onto the canvas. He would build up a surface of these lines, one very close to the next, creating what looked almost like weaving. He did this for the rest of his life, building up chaotic surfaces with these matchstick size knives of tightly ordered rhythms. The lines in themselves represented the energy used to produce the canvas and the ridges, seemingly thousands of them, would reflect the light in a super saturated way far greater and more intense than their physical size would suggest – they would glow. This building up of surface could have references to a hallucinatory experience as well as to a digitized field, so in the 50s and the 60s Lee’s art seemed to anticipate both the psychedelic era and the digital world we know today. Before the advent of the personal computer and several years before LSD was popular among young people, my father Lee Mullican was, decades earlier, already a traveler in his own psyche.
Lee Did What He Wanted
Lee was a very loving father and extremely sympathetic to his family’s needs. However, if he was at a dinner party at home and bored, he would retire to the bedroom—leaving my mother to run the party so he could return to his work. In his life, his art was No.1. And while his art was many things, first and foremost, my father was a painter. And then he was a draftsman, as well as a sculptor who could build fetishes out of dried mango pits. He played with ceramics, worked with bronze, took photographs, used computers as art, wrote short stories, typed long stories, and wrote many, many plays. He designed sets for the theatre as well as performed as an actor, on stage and in film. He was always aware of the context he was working in, always participating in the histories of the mediums, because ultimately he was a player of mediums.
Lee Mullican and Family Courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican
Lee the Dancer
To watch my father dance was rare for me but I did manage a few times to view his long arms and legs move like a shaman, from big band to rock n’ roll, spin and swirl my mother in an effortless expression of great abandonment, humor and style. Though both my parents were wonderful dancers, it was always such a surprise to see him let loose with my mother, perhaps because of his height—a towering 6’5”. When I was a child we would visit the Santo Domingo Pueblo many times to see their Corn Dance. Everyone in the Pueblo would be organized by their gender and age, starting with the youngest and ending with the oldest, consisting of at least two groups that would alternately dance for the entire day. We would arrive around one o’clock and stay until evening, hoping to see my father’s favorite dancers: the Clowns. They were painted entirely in black and white stripes from head to toe, and their job was to manage the dance. They would take care of the children, get water for the elders, and make the audience laugh. In a way, they were the cosmic cops of the dance. I could see the joy in my father’s face at these celebrations, he looked much the same each time he led my mother onto the floor in their own euphoric dance.
What Are You Drawing?
Many times, I asked my father what he was drawing and he would reply that he was drawing the world as it truly was – a world that is underneath the learned projections that society imposes on us from birth. This world seems to be a miraculous one where there are no cars, houses, animals, cities, people, movie theatres, or TVs, but instead a world of color, light, energy, contrast, movement – a sensual world - that could be understood by an infant child, a dog, a cat, an ant or even a bee. He felt that the true world was in a way underneath the world we see and that he was representing it through his art. This world is not ironic, jaded, heroic or important. It is simply miraculous and true. My father Lee was a Modernist who believed his art was representing a possible future and that in time, it would be recognized as such.
Installation View, 2016 Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC
Untitled (Desert), 1956 Oil on canvas 50 x 30 in.
From Where, 1955 Oil on canvas 40 x 20 in.
Untitled, 1965 Painted wood 66 x 4 x 5 in.
California Landscape, 1959 Graphite on paper 24 x 19 in. Sheet 27 x 30 in. Frame
Untitled, 1959
Untitled, 1958-59
Graphite on paper
Graphite on paper
24 x 18 in. Sheet
23 1/2 x 18 in. Sheet
28 1/2 x 22 1/2 in. Frame
30 x 24 in. Frame
Originally published in Lee Mullican: Selected Drawings, 1945-1980 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 1999), 9-17.
Lee Mullican: The Drawing Appears ALLAN McCOLLUM It’s just a record of the process.... It’s just a record of my being an artist, and the real, vital thing is that I am that artist. As I say that, I am standing on this particular metaphysical, almost unexplainable plane in my studio, and the canvas is there before me. And it’s this attitude that makes the painting appear. And once it appears, you’re not quite sure how it got there. 1 For Lee Mullican the studio was a magical place, a hallowed place, a place for meditation, a metaphysical plane, and a refuge. It was not only a very personal space where the outside world—including influences from other artists—could disappear; it was also a space where all his previous personal experiences could be set aside. It was a space where he felt as if he were almost a kind of medium: It’s a state of mind... As you are working through this process of painting, the painting’s there. There is an end to it. The painting’s there, but you’ve gone through this metaphysical process... it’s a meditative act.” (p. 83) For Mullican an artwork was so much more than a product of technique, knowledge, experience, and wisdom; his artwork was, as he explained it, a product of attitude. A story that he used to tell about an event that took place when he was in college at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1940’s (he recalled that at that time he was “one of maybe four or five abstract artists in all of Oklahoma”) may shed some light on what he meant by “attitude.” This particular incident involved his teacher, Oscar Jacobson, the dean of the art school, who painted landscapes in a very expressionistic manner: One day he had an exhibition in the lobby of the building and in the publicity they had reproduced one of his paintings upside down.... So, when we came the next morning into the lobby he had turned the painting upside down. And I thought, “That is an attitude that really hits home.” I loved that. So I said, “Isn’t that great, it can be any way, and it’s still okay.” (pp. 12-13) At the moment when his teacher turned his painting upside down, it must have seemed to Mullican that all the formal rules of painting and all the conventions of exhibiting art had been rendered arbitrary, if not moot. The turning of the painting was an expression of flexibility, acceptance, and freedom—a gesture that must have seemed both transcendent and anarchistic to the young Mullican—and it was “still okay.” Orientation in space—in actual space, personal space, moral space, social space, and metaphorical space—was one of Mullican’s chief preoccupations as an artist. Orientation in space was a close brother to “attitude,” and the subject came up often and in many forms when he discussed his work. Nearly fifty years later he described his lifelong work habits in this way: “I was one minute grasping outer space, and the next minute I was grasping what’s below the desert floor” (p. 96). Interestingly, Mullican’s meditation on space and orientation was deeply reinforced by his service in the United States Army during World War II, when he drew maps for the topographic battalion in Paris, Texas: I was drawing and learning to make maps from aerial photographs and all of that, but I was completely lost... I was always drawing, and interested in drawing, and of course in the topographic battalion there was all the paper and ink pens, and everything you wanted to work with was right there. So I did a lot of drawing at that time... [Later, in Oahu] we actually really started making maps...and then by that time I felt like I was really making a contribution. And I loved working with aerial photographs, which was a great influence on my painting. (p. 22)
_______________________ 1Paul
J. Karlstrom, Lee Mullican Interview, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 22 May 1992–4 March 1993, 83. All subsequent quotations from Mullican are from this exceptionally sensitive interview.
Interestingly, Mullican’s meditation on space and orientation was deeply reinforced by his service in the United States Army during World War II, when he drew maps for the topographic battalion in Paris, Texas: I was drawing and learning to make maps from aerial photographs and all of that, but I was completely lost... I was always drawing, and interested in drawing, and of course in the topographic battalion there was all the paper and ink pens, and everything you wanted to work with was right there. So I did a lot of drawing at that time... [Later, in Oahu] we actually really started making maps...and then by that time I felt like I was really making a contribution. And I loved working with aerial photographs, which was a great influence on my painting. (p. 22) Mullican, who was to become a pacifist, later found that his contribution to the war effort was less than he imagined. It turned out that his maps were never used: We got to Guam...and we were making maps for the invasion of Japan, and then one day it was all over.... I was on the night shift, and they picked me up ... and as I got into the weapons carrier, the driver said, “‘It’s all over.” I said, “What do you mean it’s all over?” He said they dropped the atomic bomb. (p. 31) Although these maps may never fulfilled their intended purpose, they clearly played an important and formative role in Mullican’s practice. What of these maps in a psychological sense? What contingent space did they define, and what place did they occupy in the young mapmaker’s mind? Later Mullican was to see for himself the devastation caused by the bombing of Japan: We landed in Yokohama.... But there was nothing but rubble. Between Yokohama and Tokyo, it was absolutely leveled. There was nothing. Maybe an occasional bathtub or a safe or something that survived all of the bombing. And Tokyo was an absolute mess, it was absolutely leveled. You can imagine: homeless, hunger everywhere, people begging.... And then, little by little,...I realized how wrong all of that had been. (p. 33) It must have been an uncanny and morally complicated experience, spending months in a protected area, apart from the battle, producing land maps to support a military invasion, having the work made useless by a devastating event-and then, in the end, being forced to witness the final results. How would one place oneself within this chain of events? What happens between a map of a possible event and an event that emerges to replace it? What territory exists between the two, and in what way are the two connected? Without a doubt these are the types of moral questions all soldiers ask themselves in solitude. In the case of Mullican, however, this liminal plane of events-in-process was to become the very subject of his work. The metaphysics of the self in relation to worldly causes and events developed into a powerful area of concern for this young abstract painter. Indeed, similar concerns played a significant role in the development of many postwar artists, and they were certainly key to the “abstract surrealists,” to whom Mullican was eventually attracted—artists who often concerned themselves with notions of automatism, chance, accident, and many other devices that problematized the agency of the artist in the creation of an artistic event. It is characteristic of the modernist era that artists began to remove themselves further and further from the feeling situated at the causal point of creation in their work. Mullican said as much himself. “It’s this attitude that makes the painting appear... and you’re not quite sure how it got there.” Is the experience of the two wars a factor here? Is this distancing a removal of the self from the guilt, heartbreak, and shame of being enmeshed in the causes?
Thinkers of the post-World War II era often placed the blame for the traumatic historical events of the first half of the twentieth century on the self- centeredness of man, the ego. A generation that was physically and morally devastated by fascism and genocide came to suspect deeply the man who over identified with either his own “self” or the “self” of a charismatic leader, and many wished for a more tempered, “non-dualistic,” “non-ego-identified” collectivity of consciousness. It was also during this period that Asian and Native American ways of thought developed a devoted following among intellectuals and artists. The precepts of these other systems of thought did not always consider the “self” to be at any kind of center; in some cultures, in fact, there was no particular place at all for the concept of “self.” The goal of many artists became to transcend, or otherwise diminish, the power of the self-centered, materialist, and malfunctioning ego. For Mullican, however, the march away from the self took on a very particular character—one that valued finding power, order, and joy in nature and spiritual awareness—and this set him apart from many artists of his generation. He trained himself rigorously in the technique of his discipline, and he developed his spirituality and wisdom through extensive travel and study and teaching. To what end? To become a heroic painter like many abstractionists of his day? Not at all. It would seem that he developed himself to be a clearer vehicle for the expression of something he considered to be much freer, more natural, and closer to the earth. Nowhere are Mullican’s efforts at this more evident than in his drawings. Here one often feels that the actual “picture” is elsewhere, not yet formed, still in the process of forming, or perhaps never to form at all. The marks that appear on the paper seem to convey a sense of the power and intelligence that might lead up to or suggest a drawing, or a sense of what might remain as the aftermath of a drawing. These marks, however, remain merely a trace, a cross-section of a perpetually cascading flow of consciousness, usually without the rudeness of a picture that might interfere with or slow down the spontaneous emergence of the process itself. It is as if the flow Mullican sought to capture were going on around and through us at all times—as if we were all, in fact, a part of it. Mullican’s traces indicate a kaleidoscopic presence of many different universes—as if the look of all codes, of all structure, of all thought, and of all being could join to form a provisional semblance of an image here and there, but a semblance that is destined to quickly disassemble and form another, different liminal image somewhere else at another moment—perhaps in another Mullican drawing. It was his deep understanding of the contingencies of form and appearance that made Mullican a great modernist, but it was his refusal to grow into a grand heroic abstractionist of the dreadful and the sublime—like others of his generation—that made him an especially different kind of modernist. He was a lover of each day as it occurred, of each fact as it was presented, of each moment as it happened, and a lover of the different cultures that sought to give form and meaning to these everyday perceptions. It has been said that Mullican’s later works followed a road to greater and greater abstraction. But is it possible that they were following a road to lesser and lesser abstraction? It was in his drawings that this growing simplicity is most evident. It appears that Mullican eventually gave up all dependency on giving credulity to any dualism of direction—as if at a certain point he finally suspended altogether his need to choose one orientation over another. It seems that Lee Mullican ultimately came to allow himself to function in the most modest way possible: as a wise and nurturing conveyance, a channel for the music of universal longing, and a gentle guardian of the events that appeared and grew before him.
Constellation, 1958 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 in.
Across The Bay, 1958
El Centro, 1958
Oil on canvas
Oil on canvas
40 x 30 in.
40 x 30 in.
The Age of the Desert, 1957 Oil on canvas 40 x 25 in.
Phantom Canvas, 1961 Oil on canvas 20 x 20 in.
Installation View, 2016 Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC
Tactile Estatics, 1955 Painted wood 25 x 16 ½ in.
LEE MULLICAN Born in Chickasha, OK, 1919 Abilene Christian College, TX, 1937 University of Oklahoma, OK, 1939 Kansas City Art Institute, MO, 1941 SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2016 2015 2014 2011 2009 2008 2007 2006 2004 2001 1999 1995 1993 1989 1987 1986 1985 1980 1977 1976 1974 1973 1972 1971 1970 1969 1968 1967 1966 1965 1964
Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC James Cohan, NYC “Lee Mullican: Shatter Space Special,” Beverly Hills, CA “Paintings 1956-1977,” Texas Gallery, Houston, TX “Meditations on a Line,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA “Important Paintings from the 1950’s,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA “Works from Rome,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA “Paintings from the 1970’s,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA “Master Works,” Fenix Gallery, Taos, NM “Lee Mullican: Paintings 1952-1968, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest of Sun,” Grey Art Gallery, NYC “Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest of Sun,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA “Lee Mullican: Paintings from the Sixties,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA “Lee Mullican: Drawings from the Estate,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angles, CA “Lee Mullican, Drawing Retrospective,” Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA “Lee Mullican: Selected Drawings 1945-1980,” Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA “Lee Mullican,” Pavilion at the Botanic Garden, Munich, Germany “Pueblo Drawings,” Thibaud Campbell Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Realizing the Possible: The Art of Lee Mullican,” University of New Mexico, Hardwood Foundation, Taos, NM “Lee Mullican,” Heritage Museum, Santa Monica, CA “Tribal Shots,” Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “New Painting and Sculpture,” Charles Campbell Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Mullican at LACE,” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition, Los Angeles, LA Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Lee Mullican,” Heritage Museum, Santa Monica, CA “Lee Mullican, Selected Works, 1948-1980,” Galerie Schreiner, Based/New York and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery “Lee Mullican: Retrospective,” Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles, CA Stables Gallery of the Taos Art Association, Taos, NM “Lee Mullican: Paintings and Drawings,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Rose Rabow Gallery, San Francisco, CA Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA Contemporary Art Gallery, Patrick Shannon, Santa Fe, NM Jodi Scully Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Esther Bear Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA Jodi Scully Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Rose Rabow Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Lee Mullican Paintings 1965-1969,” UCLA Art Galleries, Los Angeles, CA Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile Willard Gallery, NYC Silvan Simone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK Esther Bear Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA Silvan Simone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Mount St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles, CA
1963 1961 1959 1958 1955 1954 1953 1952 1951 1950 1949
Rose Rabow Gallery, San Francisco, CA Pasadena Art Museum (retrospective), Pasadena, CA Gifford Phillips Collection at UCLA Art Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Santa Monica Art Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Willard Gallery, NYC Paul Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA Alexander Rabow Gallery, San Francisco, CA Paul Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Gump’s Gallery, San Francisco, CA Willard Gallery, NYC Philbrook Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK Willard Gallery, NYC San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2016 2015
2014
2013
2012
2011 2009 2008 2006 2005 2003 2002 2000
“Art of Northern California: Three Stories,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War,” The Museum of Modern Art, NYC “Shatter Special,” Equitable Vitrines, Los Angeles, CA “Transcendence: Abstraction & Symbolism in the American West,” Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT “The Art Show,” Art Dealers Association of America, NYC “All Watched Over,” James Cohan, NYC “Selections from the Joann and Gifford Phillips Gift,” New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM “This is not a Connection,” Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Lee Mullican & Cameron,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA “Western Light, Ecstatic Landscape,” Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Ketchum, ID “Santa Monica Originals,” Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Highlights from the Gus Foster Collection,” The Hardwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM “California Contemporary Modernists: a Virtual Exhibition,” Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Down to Earth: Modern Artists and the Land, Before Land Art,” LACMA, Los Angeles, CA “Unruly,” Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA “Highlights from the Harwood Museum of Art’s Collection of Contemporary Art,” Harwood Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA “Selections from the Grunwald Center and the Hammer Contemporary Collection,” Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA “Local Color,” San Jose Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA “Selections of American Modernism,” Aeron Payne Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM “Conversation with the Curators: Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1952-1969,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA “Pacific Standard Time Art in Los Angeles 1950-1980,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA “Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1952-1969,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA “Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California,” Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA “Abstract Now and Then Exhibition,” Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA “Taos Moderns,” Aaron Payne Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM “Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1989,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC “Traces du Sucre,” Centre Pompidou, Paris, France “100 Works/100 Artists – A through Z,” The Annex Galleries, Santa Rosa, CA “Drawings: The Hand of the Artists,” Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Shifting Dimensions: Sculptors on Paper,” Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Driven to Abstraction: Southern California and the Non-Objective World, 1950-1980,” Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA “California Gold,” Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Holiday Highlights,” Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Creative Transitions,” Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Creative Transition II,” Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity 1900-2000,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
1996 1995 1992 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986
1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980
1977 1976 1972 1969 1967 1966 1965 1964 1961
1955 1953 1952 1951
1950
“Flight Patterns,” Museum of Contemporary Art at the Geffen, Los Angeles, CA “Fifteen Profiles: Distinguished California Modernists,” Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA “Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surreality in Early California Art,” Wight Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA “Paintings of the Inner World, Color in Space,” Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Dynaton, Before and Beyond,” Frederick R, Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA “Light and Color – Dynaton Painters,” Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Moderns 1920-1950,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA “Mullican & Mullican,” Johnson Gallery, University Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM “Computer Art,” IBM Gallery, Syracuse University, New York “Moderns in Mind,” A Rothko Foundation Exhibit, Artists Space, NYC “Visions of Inner Space,” Wight Art Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985,” Hague Eemeente Museum, Netherlands “New California Painting,” Rancho Santiago College Art Gallery, Santa Ana, CA “Moderns in Mind,” Artists Space, NYC “Dede Bazyk/Lee Mullican,” LACE, Los Angeles, CA “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985,” Los Angeles, CA “Sunshine and Shadow,” Fisher Art Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA “Sculptors and Their Graphics,” Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Surrealism in California,” Fisher Art Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA “Drawings by Painters,” Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA “Exhibition of Contemporary L.A. Artists,” Nagoya City Museum, Nagoya, Japan “L.A.: Contemporary Paintings,” Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Abstraction in L.A., 1950-1980,” University of California, Irvine, CA “Contemporary Panting in California,” High Museum, Atlanta, GA “California Painting – The Essential Modernist Framework,” California State University, Los Angeles, CA “History of California Painting,” San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA “Light and Color: Images from New Mexico,” Sheldon Memorial Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE “Painting & Sculpture,” Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA “Five Footnotes to Modern Art History: Dynaton Revisited,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA “Private Images – Photographs by Painters,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA “Paintings and Drawings in the Museum’s Collection,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA “California Painting and Sculpture: The Modern Era,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, LA “Tamarind: A Renaissance of Lithography,” The International Exhibitions Foundation, Washington D.C. “West Coast, 1945-1969,” Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA “10 Selected Artists,” Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA Biennial, Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia, PA “Some Continuing Directions,” selected by Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Phillips, Balboa Pavilion, Newport Beach, CA Centenaire de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paris, France “Tamarind Artists,” Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA “75th Anniversary Exhibition, Three Distinguished Artists from Oklahoma: Lee Mullican, Joseph Glasco, Leon Polk Smith,” Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK Mount St. Mary’s College Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “50 California Artists,” Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC “New Object,” Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA Mount St. Mary’s College Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA III Bienal, Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo, Brazil Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC Detroit Museum of Art, Detroit, MI “American Art Annual,” Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC “Dynaton,” San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford University, Stanford, CA “American Painting Today,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA “American Painting Today, 1950,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA France Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM The Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, CA Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California Davis, Davis, CA Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chili Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX Museum of Modern Art, NYC Museum of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA Newport Harbor Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma, OK Orange County Museum of Art, New Port Beach, CA Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK Philips Collection, Washington D.C. Roswell Museum of Art Center, Roswell, NM San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA San Francisco Municipal Collection, San Francisco, CA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. The Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, NY Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC TEACHING EXPERIENCE 1962 University of California Los Angeles, CA 1961 University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA AWARDS 1964 Fellowship, Tamarind, Lithograph Workshop, Los Angeles, CA 1963 Institute of Creative Art, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 1959 Guggenheim Fellowship
LEE MULLICAN Publication Š 2016 Susan Inglett Gallery NYC All Rights Reserved Design: Aryn Foland Image courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican and Marc Selwyn Fine Art Installation Photography Credit: Adam Reich, NYC Text: Matt Mullican Essay: Allan McCollum, Originally published in Lee Mullican: Selected Drawings, 1945-1980 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 1999), 9-17. Published by: SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY 522 West 24 Street New York, New York 10011 212 647 9111 | info@inglettgallery.com No image or portion thereof may be copied, reproduced or electronically stored/transmitted without permission.
SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY