LEE MULLICAN
Works from the 50s
LEE MULLICAN
(1919-1993)
Works from the 50s
Opening Reception: 5 - 7 PM | Saturday, May 24
Exhibition Dates: May 24 - July 7, 2025
Image on opposite page courtesy of the Estate
INTRODUCTION
203 Fine Art and the Estates of Luchita Hurtado & Lee Mullican presents a selection of paintings from the 1950s by the accomplished Taos Modern artist, Lee Mullican (19191998). These abstracted paintings, dated 1956 to 1958, were created shortly after Mullican’s move to Los Angeles, marking a subtle yet striking shift in his practice. There becomes a lightness, with joyous elements of playful energy seemingly related to Mullican’s admiration of composer John Cage, specifically Cage’s creations from his time spent in the festive culture of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Shortly after the last of these paintings were completed, in 1959, Mullican won a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Rome. His works are 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, curated 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.
Detail of artwork on opposite page: Wounded, 1958
TheWayThingsGrow, 1958
40 x 40”, oil on canvas
Clowns, 1958
40 x 30”, oil on canvas
MULLICAN IN THE 50’s WORDS FROM THE ESTATe
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.
Mullican once described his work as a “preference for the fall of rain without the lightning bolt”, a poetic way of explaining his interest in gentle accumulation rather than dramatic effect. This sensibility is especially present in the paintings on view here. Their textured surfaces suggest movement and time, but in a way that’s quiet and contemplative. Whether you read them as abstract fields, cosmic diagrams, or simply as surfaces to get lost in, they invite slow looking and open interpretation. In this body of work, Mullican creates a space where inner vision and the vastness of the universe feel intimately connected.
Lee Mullican’s palette knife technique in his studio, photo courtesy of the Estate
TheRitesofSpring, 1958
50 x 40.125”, oil on canvas
Constellation, 1958
40 x 30”, oil on canvas
Punch, 1957
14 x 10”, oil on canvas
AcrosstheBay, 1958
40 x 30”, oil on canvas
DYNATON
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.
Detail of TheRitesofSpring, 1958
50 x 40.125”, oil on canvas
“[Dynaton]emergedfromtherambunctiouseraofParisian SurrealismandtheblackshadowofthewarinEurope,coupled withtheexpansivemoodoftheUnitedStatesintheimmediatepostwarera.Dynaton’sheadyaimwasnothinglessthantoremakea shatteredworld,byunleashingthepoweroftheunimaginedand thepossible...”
ARTREVIEW:THESHORT,HAPPYLIFEOFDYNATON CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT DEC. 16, 1992
Celebrant, 1958
50 x 40.25”, oil on canvas
50 x 22”, oil on canvas
SwimmingDevil, 1956
SouthernCaliforniaLandscape, 1958
40 x 30”, oil on canvas
Promenade, 1959
30 x 20”, oil on canvas
Wounded, 1958
50 x 40.125”, oil on canvas
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 did not copy nor transcribe traditional knowledge 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.
Detail of SouthernCaliforniaLandscape, 1958
40 x 30”, oil on canvas
From Where, 1955
40 x 20”, oil on canvas
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Reluctant to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and the current art world trends, Lee Mullican 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.
Mullican’s style is drawn from various sources— most notably, his experience in the army as an aerial topographer in the early 1940s. 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.
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 juxtaposed the chaos of the natural world and the linearity of scientific empiricism.
Institutional and Public Collections:
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA
Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L.A., CA
Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A., CA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma, OK
Pasadena Museum of CA Art, Pasadena, CA
Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, S.F., CA
Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, D.C.
The Whitney Museum, N.Y.C., NY
Lee Mullican in his studio, photograph courtesy of the Estate
