Lee Mullican (1919–1998) was an American painter whose works synthesized European Surrealism and American abstraction. He moved to San Francisco after WWII in 1947. Mullican’s experience as a topographer during the war instilled in him an admiration for the abstract patterns inherent in natural forms. In his paintings, he opted for clashing yet complementary colors, building images that were both serene and stimulating. His paintings are abstract and have a linear quality to them.During the 1950s, Mullican refined his signature use of the printer's knife to create his luminous and transcendental imagery. The artist’s style became more meditative and focused on the landscape. Mullican, along with Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford, were known collectively as “the Dynaton.” This group of artists, named after the Greek word for “the possible,” acted as a bridge between the European Surrealist and American Abstract Expressionist schools. Disbanding shortly after their historic exhibition in 1951 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dynaton explored the subconscious mind, mysticism, automatism, and the influences of ancient cultures. Mullican remained true to these ideas, and went on to develop his own highly personal imagery, exploring the concept of awareness characterized by the meditative self, surrounded by the energy of the landscape and the cosmos.
Mullican was a member of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty from 1962 to 1990. In 2005, Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized a retrospective of fifty years of the artist’s work. Mullican’s works 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 Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, among others.