Edward Millman

Edward Millman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1907. He studied under Leon Kroll and John Warner Norton in the early 1930s at the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and later spent time in Mexico to study the work of Jose Clemente Orozco as inspiration for his work in the St. Louis post office mural.

Over his extensive career as an artist, Millman completed numerous murals, including one for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933, the St. Louis, Missouri post office mural for which he and Mitchel Siporin were awarded $29,000 in 1939, and many others.

His artwork focused on the middle-class, as he identified himself among the worker class. His work focused on sympathetic representation of the working class struggles, including out-of-work laborers and artisans of old world crafts.

Millman served in the Navy as a combat artist during World War II from 1944-1945, where he and other artists produced over 1,300 drawings, watercolors, and paintings of war. In 1945, Millman received a special citation from the Navy for his part in this program, and a Guggeinheim Fellowship in recognition of his wartime depictions.

Millman later served as the chief illustrator for the Chicago Evening American newspaper and worked for The Chicagoan magazine. He also taught at Indiana University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Arkansas, Cornell University, and Layton School of Art. He served as artist-in-residence for a year at the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a professor of art at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1956 until his death in Woodstock, New York, in 1964.