Lee Mullican. A Son of Oklahoma Pioneers

Lee Mullican in his studio, Venice, California, ca. 1966–67.
man sitting in the bottom right of a view into his studio of large canvases
Lee Mullican in his studio, Venice, California, ca. 1966–67. Photo courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican.

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


  1. Lee Mullican, oral history interview with Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, May 22, 1992–March 4, 1993, transcript available at aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-lee-mullican-12846. ↩︎

  2. Lee Mullican, oral history interview with Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, May 22, 1992–March 4, 1993, transcript available at aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-lee-mullican-12846. ↩︎

  3. Lee Mullican, oral history interview with Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, May 22, 1992–March 4, 1993, transcript available at aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-lee-mullican-12846. ↩︎

  4. Lee Mullican, oral history interview with Joann Phillips for the Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, as part of “Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait,” January 8, 16, and 23 and February 20, 1976, transcript available at archive.org/details/leemullicanoralh00mull/page/n349/mode/2up. ↩︎