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 urgency of the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War and the painterly abstraction of the 1950s and early 1960s. Within the wider field of Hanga the principal interest in Millman lies in his postwar engagement with Japan: as one of the United States Navy's official combat artists during the closing campaigns of 1944-45 he produced an extensive body of drawings and watercolours of Japanese landscape, civilian life and the human cost of the war, and his later teaching work — which included a residency at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Herron Museum of Art in Indianapolis — placed him among the American figurative artists most directly shaped by an extended encounter with the Japanese subject.

He was born in Chicago on 1 January 1907, the son of an immigrant Russian-Jewish family, and grew up in the working-class neighbourhoods of the West Side. He enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1920s and studied principally with Leon Kroll, the Henri-trained figure painter whose disciplined American realism shaped a generation of Chicago artists, and with John Warner Norton, the muralist who had brought Renaissance fresco technique into Chicago public building decoration. Norton in particular pointed Millman toward the mural and toward the great public-art tradition of Mexico, and in 1934 Millman travelled to Mexico to work 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 for mural projects of 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 (1935) 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 executed in egg tempera in the disciplined narrative-allegorical mode that Millman developed from Rivera and from the Renaissance fresco tradition, with state historical episodes organised into receding registers of monumental figures. The mural studies, on tempera and fiberboard, are now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's great holding of New Deal mural sketches (the 1974.28 group, transferred from the General Services Administration in 1974) and constitute the principal surviving record of his Federal mural style. 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 in 1996 — and for the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago of 1933-34.