Martin Mull, Painter

  Martin Mull, Band on the Run,images courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Gallery.

By DAVID JAGER August 2, 2024

We may have loved him serving drinks as Colonel Mustard in the camp classic “Clue”, or popping up in clunky disguises as private investigator Gene Parmesan in “Arrested Development”. We may have long enjoyed the smooth strains of his jazz folk guitar accompanying his parodic songs, such as the iconic “Humming Song”: a gift that turned into an eight-album career and consistent demands for his appearance on the road and television.

What is less known is that, first and foremost, Martin Mull was a painter. Not a painter of the “celebrity hobbyist” variety, either. Painting was his first and most insistent calling. Even if his public persona as performer currently dominates our thoughts of him, music and comedy were avocations he took up to support his art. Friends and fellow artists closest to Mull, some who had known him since his student days at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design are clear that Mull is a painter first, comedian and musician second.

When touring or on set, in fact, Mull was insistent that his paints and his easel go with him. When he was not, he would spend upwards of eight hours a day in his studio laboring at his craft. There was rarely a day when he wasn’t insistently devoted to his art, often starting at daybreak. When stationed in motels and hotel rooms, he would sometimes use his deft, technically accomplished brush to ‘improve’ the art that was in his room. As a man who revelled in playing offbeat and unreliable weirdos, he was an unfailingly scrupulous and diligent painter.

As a musician and comic Martin Mull’s medium has always been pastiche, skewering the vain absurdities and contradictions of twentieth century culture and the American dream. He was at utterly home in the vernacular of Americana, and he could astutely deploy his references in ways that were sublimely surreal, hilarious and a tad sinister. His voluminous output of paintings makes sense in this regard.

None of this, however, makes Mull a “pasticheur”. Pastiche exists for the creation of pleasant nostalgic effects made from familiar and well-worn tropes. Everything in Mull’s work, on the hand, pushes strenuously against all of this. There wasn’t a well-worn cliché that Mull didn’t want to upend. His use of stock images from mainstream advertising  often clipped from life magazine, Better Homes & Gardens,  or advertisements from Esquire, are ripped from their comfortable contexts and reconfigured in sharp and alchemical ways. He is using the detritus of pop culture not to create more pablum, but rather to make the underlying tension and cognitive dissonance between its composite elements more jarringly visible.

He accomplishes this through contrasts both sharp and subtle, recreating what often appear to be photographic elements with an old master’s invisible brush stroke. He also does it through bold color contrasts- B & W versus color is a constant- often to promote disquieting visual and symbolic effects. He is also given to novel investigations of the picture plane, something more evident in his later work, inspired by his rediscovery of “The Lesson” by Henri Matisse. Mull is interested in the way figures and grounds intertwine and interact, often in ways that deceptively look like collage but are painstakingly painted by hand. In this sense he appears to have graduated from his early photorealism to a unique form of magical realism. His scenes exists neither outside or inside, but somewhere on a psychic plane between media, memory and daily life.

In “Band on the Run” a June cleaver technicolor housewife is taking photos through her new Kodak camera in her glorious backyard, but her subject is a group of African American street musicians in B&W, occupying the other side of the canvas. One figure, bending over, is neatly truncated by the divide. On the color side, where only his backside and legs are visible, he could simply be a gardener in the woman’s backyard. The other half of his body, in the B&W world, is picking up a bass drum in a dusty street. Mull addresses a societal divide by painting it literally, melding two worlds simply placing them side by side.

In “Happy Hour” a life magazine housewife circa 1955 brings twin pints of beer to her businessman husband as a five-alarm fire devours a house in the background. The view is aerial, and the juxtaposition of figures, smiling and suspended in idealized space is meant to be disorienting, dysphoric. Here is the shiny surface narrative of a marriage, here is the domicile in flames. It also brings up immediate other associations, like the upheavals of the civil rights protests, or the Rodney King LA riots of 92.

Martin Mull, Happy Hour, Images courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Gallery.

These depictions of the inner tensions of bourgeois life recall Eric Fischl in their glossy near photo realist execution they approach the sublime blandness of Gerhard Richter’s similar explorations. Comparisons have also been made to Rosenquist, not to mention the similar compositional collage effects of David Salle. But there is something distinctly midwestern in the painting of Mull, a psychological purview into the workings of the American subconscious that is all his. No one quite gets the suburban post war white knuckling better than him. It runs at least as deeply in his painting as it does in the short stories of Raymond Carver. Mull has created a visual language that grasps the muted anxiety of the Cold War white collar zeitgeist, and does it arrestingly.

Whiteness, in this sense, is a theme of Mull’s work. The product of a very white bread Ohio upbringing, he reflects the circumspect caution, the fastidiousness, the unobtrusive ‘gosh golly gee whiz’ blandness that is white culture of his era. He is not apologizing for it or demonizing it. Rather, in deadpan fashion reminiscent of his Midwestern forbears, he exposes and then skews it. Mull doesn’t seek to liberate himself from his background, or interrogate his own ‘privilege’, whatever that may be, but rather examine, minutely, using the culture of images he grew up in.

Mull was extremely prolific in his output. It was one of the reasons his painting is overlooked: it is hard to believe he managed to have produced as much considering he also had two other successful careers. Yet painting was his main preoccupation, a staple he returned to and strove to perfect. Completely uninterested in the vagaries of the artworld, he ploughed steadily ahead, creating a body of work that rivals contemporaries who devoted their lives to painting exclusively. Yet Mull, in his mild mannered, genial and unobtrusive way, kept up with them. Mull may be remembered first and foremost as a painter, in the end. WM