Lee Mullican was born December 2, 1919, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a small farming town, to Harris and Zula Jolley Mullican. His father, originally from Texas, had trained as a schoolteacher and was a business- man in Chickasha. His mother, an amateur artist, had grown up in North Carolina.
Mullican 's boyhood was uneventful but pleasant, a close family situation with a brother and sister and cousins, and he spent Wednesday nights at prayer meetings and Sunday mornings in church. Except for occasional family trips to North Carolina and one to Washington, D.C., he remained in Chickasha until 1937, when he was sent to Abilene Christian College in Abilene, Texas.
By the time he went to Abilene, he knew he was interested in art and music, having been influenced in oil painting by his mother. In order to take more art courses (but still be able to convince his supportive but somewhat mystified family that he was receiving a traditional college education) , he transferred from Abilene to the University of Oklahoma, which he attended from 1939 to 1941. With the spread of World War II, it was clear that he would soon be drafted, and he insisted on spending his final year of college at the Kansas City Art Institute. Upon graduation in 1942, he was drafted into the army, and his three years of service took him to California, the South Pacific, and finally Japan.
During these years, he was increasingly exposed to art. At the Kansas City Art Institute, he spent a great deal of his time at the Rockhill-Nelson Art Gallery, where he immersed himself in its great Oriental collection. In the army in Honolulu, he spent his free time at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
While serving as a topographer in the Army Corps of Engineers, he met a number of architects, designers, and writers, who told him about the burgeoning art activity in San Francisco. After his release from the service, he was invited to San Francisco by his army friend Jack Stauffacher, who introduced him to and helped him settle into the Bay Area art and literary community.
Mullican soon met Gordon Onslow-Ford, the English surrealist, and Wolfgang Paalen, the painter, and a whole new world was opened to him which included the history of European art and an awareness of primitive art. He also met the famous European architect Eric Mendelsohn, who was impressed by his work and offered him a commission.
His first one-man show was at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1949. Later, in 1951, Mullican, Onslow- Ford, and Paalen banded together and put on the famous "Dynaton" show at that museum. "Dynaton," which is from the Greek, refers to a limitless continuum in which all forms of reality are possible, and that idea has always been seminal to Mullican's work. Also very important to his work is the influence of primitive art, the magic and emotional quality that primitive art conveys; he has always collected and surrounded himself with primitive objects.
In 1950, he had a show at the Marian Willard Gallery in New York, where he has shown subsequently. By 1951, the stimulation and lure of San Francisco seemed to be at an end for him, and he moved with Luchita Hurtado (Paalen's former wife) to Los Angeles, where he has continued to make art and to teach.
In 1959-60, Mullican received a Guggenheim award, and he and his family spent the year in Rome and also toured Europe. After a winter's stay outside of New York and another show at the Willard Gallery, he returned to Los Angeles and began teaching art at UCLA. He has remained at UCLA, where he is a highly respected member of the art faculty.
In the transcript that follows, which comprises tape-recorded interviews made with the UCLA Oral History Program, Lee Mullican describes his early background, his emergence as a young artist, and the influences and encouragement he received during the important germinal period in San Francisco. He talks about his more mature period in Los Angeles and of his many years of quiet art making and teaching. He discusses his attitudes towards art, the psychological and emotional feelings he experiences when he works, and his hopes for the future.