Martin Mull just got his free cup of coffee.
"It's like having your Starbucks card punched," he says. "Getting my card punched here is a milestone."
"Here" is the Las Vegas Art Museum, which has redeemed Mull's Lifetime-in-Art coupon with a career retrospective. Adventures in a Temperate Climate: A Retrospective of Paintings by Martin Mull, which opens Sunday, comprises works from roughly the mid-1980s to the present, all expressions of his first and maybe only love.
"The professional humorist is, in fact, basically, my cab-driving job. It has always been to support this," says Mull, strolling through the LVAM galleries Monday morning. "This is the flagship."
Fans who associate Mull with his recurring roles on Roseanne and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and especially those whose memories reach past Fernwood 2Nite and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to his days as a comic troubadour, might be surprised to learn that he has always been a painter first. He earned his BFA in 1965 and his MFA in 1967 at the Rhode Island School of Design, where, as a scholarship student, he took up folk-singing "to pay for my rent, my beer, my cigarettes."
Finding "a modicum of success" and having no higher degree to pursue—the art historian's doctorate did not interest him—Mull took to the road. He performed in campus coffeehouses and theaters around the country and recorded several albums. Martin Mull and His Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room, a live album from 1973, captures his tone of seeming sincerity in songs such as "Licks Off of Records," which satirizes the guitar-god cult of the day.
Some of this wit transfers to his paintings, but only to a point. An airbrush painting from the mid-1980s, "An Italian Landscape," shows a group of figurine dogs around a pizza box. Except for some titles, however, Mull mostly eschews humor in paint. "I think it's impossible to deny your personality completely," he says, "but I have tried, and certainly in recent history, to not be funny, only because I think it confuses the viewer—especially if you have any kind of reputation that precedes you."
Instead, Mull has pursued the postwar-generation enterprise of mining memory from the cavernous shafts of pop-culture imagery. Pulling images from old postcards and reading primers as well as from family photo albums, Mull reimagines a glory-years America. He will turn 63 in August and finds himself fascinated by the blur that was ages 1 to 20—"just to try to go back and say, 'What the hell happened, how did I get here?'"
In the case of "Birthday Boy XI" (2000), which outlines what Mull describes as "psychosexual coming of age," the question is perhaps best left unanswered, although it's worth noting that the painting was shown in the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art's 2001 exhibition of Steve Martin's collection. (The fellow former-troubadour owns several of Mull's paintings.) "Parents II" (2003), with its rabbit-eared boy and girl in a '50s-style living room, probes a more general but no less provocative idea of childhood. Here, as in other, more recent paintings, Mull renders the figures in grisaille and the background in color, as if they were on a black-and-white television of the time.
Mull accepts the idea that we assemble ourselves from the media images assaulting us. His generation was the first to do so, and reconfiguring those images is a way to make sense of them. But it is no mere therapy that engages him, rather a sense that all is not as it seems. In "The Aerialist" (2004), a little girl in a dress performs a highwire act for her family, and the floral border underlines the veneer of domesticity laid over tense moments. In a sense, this perspective resonates with that of the satirist Mull.
"If you think back, there was just an enormous promissory note that was handed to this country, I think, after World War II: All right, now we're done with war, we're on to prosperity," he says. "Underneath that wasn't just a raging infection necessarily, something that dark; but there was just a melancholy of disappointment, a patina of disappointment that went with it, because these things didn't come true."
Mull says he's seen people approach his paintings as if they were Rockwell-esque odes to midcentury America, then double-take "when they see something is rotten in Denmark. ... It's as if one's put a welcome mat in front of a haunted house."
The tour of that house leads from Mull's polished airbrush work of the 1980s through grittier, looser paintings of the 1990s and back to a more refined, though still disturbing, style. The more recent work, which fills the center gallery, seems less personal. "Homeland Security" (2005) shows a clown leading a disorganized bucket brigade. "In the event of a real emergency, this is what we'll turn into," says Mull. But he allows himself to be witty in titles and otherwise disowns topicality: "All this comes under the heading, 'This too shall pass.'"
And so has the performing Mull, who considers himself all but retired. Performing enabled him to paint, but he says it also hampered his artistic career. "Because I had gained some small notoriety, I was instantly aligned with Red Skelton and his clowns. ... It puts you in a lose-lose situation."
But anyone who took a closer look found an artist who quotes from paintings by Edward Hopper and Henri Matisse, who cites influences from Piero della Francesca and James Ensor to David Salle and Gerhard Richter. And Mull has exhibited around the country for more than 30 years. Along the way, he earned the respect of critic Dave Hickey, who brought Mull to the attention of spouse Libby Lumpkin, LVAM's director. Lumpkin slated Mull's retrospective in LVAM's Contemporaries Series.
Mull says he's always considered his two careers "apples and oranges." And he's delighted that his paintings have won recognition on their own. "What one hopes is that it is not in fact you you are exhibiting, it is your work. If the work speaks otherwise, then you're all right."