Edward Millman

Edward Millman (1907-1964) was an American painter, muralist, lithographer and combat artist whose career bridged the high social realism of the Depression-era Federal art programmes, the documentary work of the Second World War and the painterly abstraction of the 1950s and early 1960s. He is remembered above all as one of the most productive muralists of the New Deal in Illinois and, later, as a United States Navy combat artist in the South Pacific.

He was born in Chicago on 1 January 1907 and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his principal teachers were the figure painter Leon Kroll and the muralist John Warner Norton. Norton in particular pointed Millman toward mural painting and toward the great public-art tradition of Mexico, and in 1934 Millman travelled to Mexico to study briefly with Diego Rivera. The Mexican stay was decisive: Rivera's example of the politically committed monumental fresco, his integration of indigenous subject matter and revolutionary narrative, and the working practice of the Mexican mural workshops gave Millman both a technical vocabulary and a moral framework that he carried back to Chicago and applied to the Federal programmes of the New Deal.

In 1935 and 1936 Millman served as state director of mural projects for the Federal Art Project in Illinois, one of the most active state sections in the country, and in the same years he completed his first major public commissions: a mural for the Moline, Illinois post office and a set of murals for the Decatur, Illinois post office (1936-38). The Decatur murals — Early Pioneers, Social Consciousness and Growth of Democracy in Illinois — were painted in egg tempera, the medium Millman favoured for his Federal cycles, in the disciplined narrative-allegorical mode he developed from Rivera and from the Renaissance fresco tradition, with state historical episodes organised into receding registers of monumental figures. Millman also painted murals for the Chicago public schools — most notably the cycle Women's Contribution to American Progress for Lucy Flower Technical High School (1940, restored 1996) — as well as work for the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago (1933-34) and for Chicago municipal buildings.

The largest of his commissions, undertaken jointly with Mitchell Siporin, was the cycle of nine murals for the St Louis, Missouri main post office, awarded in 1939 after a national competition and completed in the early 1940s. Depicting the history of the Mississippi Valley from indigenous settlement through European colonisation, river commerce and westward expansion, it carried one of the largest mural awards the federal government made and confirmed Millman and Siporin as leading Chicago muralists of their generation. During the same Federal period Millman produced a substantial body of independent easel paintings and works on paper on social-realist themes, several of which are now held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In the mid-1940s Millman was commissioned a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve and served as an official Navy combat artist in the South Pacific Theater during 1944 and 1945. He was one of eight artists selected at the request of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to record impressions of the war in ways the camera and the written word could not; embedded with fighting units, the group together produced more than 1,300 drawings, watercolours and paintings, many of them widely reproduced in books, magazines and newspapers. In recognition of this work the Navy issued him a citation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded him a Fellowship in 1945.

After the war Millman settled at Woodstock, the long-established artist colony in the Catskills, and held a succession of teaching positions across the United States, including Indiana University, Washington University in St Louis, the University of Arkansas, Cornell University, the Layton School of Art and the Albright Art School in Buffalo; from 1956 until his death he was professor of art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he served for a year as artist-in-residence at the Art Institute of Chicago that had trained him three decades earlier. His painting in these years moved progressively away from the disciplined narrative realism of the Federal era toward a freer, more painterly figuration, and by the mid-1950s he was producing works of full painterly abstraction that combined the dense, gestural surface of postwar abstraction with the underlying compositional discipline he had carried out of the mural years.

He died at Woodstock, New York, on 11 February 1964, aged fifty-seven. His papers — including photographic documentation of his murals together with diaries, correspondence and source material for the Federal cycles — are held at Syracuse University Library, where they remain a primary research collection for the New Deal art programmes. Millman's work is now held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo and the United States Navy Art Collection, which retains the bulk of his wartime production. He is best remembered as one of the foremost Chicago muralists and social-realist painters of the New Deal generation, and as one of the war artists whose South Pacific service produced an enduring documentary record of the American experience of the Second World War.