Lee Mullican. A Son of Oklahoma Pioneers

Lee Mullican in his studio, Venice, California, ca. 1966–67.

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Lee Mullican was born in 1919 in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a small farming town in the then-newly incorporated state. Mullican began making art at a young age—his mother was an amateur artist—and he recalled being particularly struck by images in a catalog his parents brought back from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: “There was a Chagall, Picasso, and other things that I had never seen before. . . . I knew that that’s where I wanted to go. Even at that age I was not interested in just setting up a still life of flowers and working from it. . . . All this strangeness intrigued me. . . . I had entered a modern age.”¹ Mullican was drafted into the Army in 1942, serving three years as a topographer in the Army Corps of Engineers. Though it was a difficult time—“a torture”²—his experiences in the Army expanded his world: he visited museums in Washington, DC; Baltimore; and New York while stationed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and met lifelong friend Jack Stauffacher, a printer from San Francisco.³ “He was a printer and was in the printing company of the battalion. We printed our own maps. I ran across this fellow one day, sitting on the toilet, reading the Life of Buddha. So, I said, here is someone that I must get to know.”⁴