Article: Mullican's magnetic fields: from his Surrealist-influenced beginnings in the Dynaton group to his late "Guardian" paintings, West Coast artist Lee Mullican favored an approach to abstraction that acknowledged spiritual forces. His career was recently examined in a traveling museum exhibition.

In an artworld obsessed with youth, fashion and politics, discussions of spirituality seem almost taboo. Presumably embarrassed by New Age beliefs and the dumbing-down of organized religions, most art historians seem now to focus on formal issues when they deal with established artists of a mystical bent such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin.

Yet, as the 1986 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985" long ago made clear, the development of modern abstraction is determinedly tied to spiritual ideas. The failure to address that spirituality has impeded ...

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