San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
December 2021
December 18, 2021–June 26, 2022
This focused presentation brings together for the first time meditative works by Paul Klee and early paintings by Lee Mullican, created after he moved to San Francisco in 1947, that blend earthly and celestial imagery and explore the inner life of the visible universe.
The Swiss-born modernist Paul Klee was an artist and teacher whose work remains influential for generations of practitioners. His compositions combine rhythmic patterns with studies of nature and the cosmos to capture what he called “a synthesis of outward sight and inner vision” that inspired artists including Lee Mullican, who first encountered Klee’s work at a memorial exhibition in 1942. Like Klee, Mullican sought “the opening of a new world, opening of the mind into a kind of cosmic thought … beyond what one saw, beyond form.”