PAT OLIPHANT (1935-2026)
Born in Adelaide, Australia, he was introduced to drawing by his father, a government draftsman. At 18, he landed a job as a copy boy at the Adelaide News. After leaving that paper for the rival Advertiser, he started doing minor illustrations - maps and photo retouching. He soon moved up to being their editorial cartoonist.
When editors disagreed with some of his cartoons, Mr. Oliphant began adding a tiny character at the margins, Punk the penguin, to voice his forbidden political views.
Bored with Australia, he moved to the US to join the Denver Post in 1964, and within a year his cartoons were syndicated internationally. In 1967, he prepared a batch of cartoons to submit for that year's Pulitzer Prize. He included one that he personally hated, but thought would appeal to the jury's politics. When it won, he was enraged. For years afterward, he condemned the Pulitzers, never again submitting his work for a prize that was awarded, in his view, more on the basis of politics than skill. “It’s a fraudulent award,” he said.
He moved to the Washington Star in 1975 and, six years later, struck out on his own, working independently without being tied to a single paper. At the height of his popularity, his work appeared in more than 500 newspapers, influencing fellow Pulitzer winners including Tom Toles, Tony Auth, Ann Telnaes and Jeff MacNelly.
He retired from cartooning in 2015, as his eyesight began to fail. But two years later, he made a brief reappearance with two editorial cartoons that were published online by the Nib, mocking President Donald Trump. “We thought that Watergate was a unique condition. But it sort of pales in comparison to what we’ve got now,” Mr. Oliphant told the Santa Fe Reporter that year. He had found a dream subject in Trump, he said, but his eyes made it all but impossible to draw. “I’ve been in this business 60 years. And I’ve waited 60 years for this [guy] to come along. And I can’t do anything about it because of my eyes.”
“He saw himself as participating in the long tradition of political caricature, going back especially to Delacroix, to Daumier, these major figures of the 19th century,” said Molly Schwartzburg, a Harvard University curator of printing and graphic arts who helped organize a 2020 exhibition of Mr. Oliphant’s work. “His work has a sort of intellectual history that brought an aesthetic seriousness to political cartooning in the 20th century. He’s a trenchant critic of the hypocrisy of politics, and he’s always seeing exactly what the politicians are up to.”
L: Oliphant in his studio, date unknown.
R: The presidents he's spoofed