Pat Oliphant, an influential political cartoonist known for creating caricatures of U.S. and world leaders, died Monday. He was 90.
Oliphant died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from age-related issues, said his son, Grant Oliphant.
A multidimensional artist who also created sculptures, lithographs and oil paintings, Oliphant was widely considered the most syndicated editorial cartoonist in the U.S. During the 1980s, his daily political cartoons appeared in more than 500 publications in the country and around the world.
For over five decades, Oliphant’s work ridiculed powerful figures — from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Donald Trump — with a blunt and meticulous stroke. He drew Jimmy Carter with large teeth and lips, alluding to his background as a farmer and the cultural stereotype of adaptation to rural work, and depicted Ronald Reagan, whom he thought was uninterested in the suffering of the American people, with a cork in his ear.
Those who knew Oliphant said his gift was to merge the shrewdness of an observer of the political scene with a witty sense of humor into art.
“He redefined what it meant to be a political cartoonist and to be fearless of his work,” said Bill Banowsky, director of the documentary A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant. “His work has a fierce pursuit of bringing injustice to life. And he was very effective.”
Oliphant tackled controversial subjects that were largely deemed unacceptable by the establishment at the time. That included the Catholic Church and its pedophilia scandals in 2002 and Israel’s offense against Hamas in Gaza in 2008. But his ethnic caricatures also drew complaints about false stereotypes and racism from organizations like the Asian American Journalists Association and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1935, Oliphant started as a copy desk aide at a local newspaper, where he discovered his interest in art while seeing a cartoonist at work. His first in-house cartoonist job was at The Advertiser in his hometown.
“He decided cartooning could merge his interests in art and commentary,” Grant said. “He wanted to be the best in the world.”
About a decade after he moved to the U.S., Oliphant joined The Denver Post in 1964 and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1967, which he despised. He later joined The Washington Stars and moved to Santa Fe in 2002.
Oliphant began losing his eyesight due to glaucoma around the age of 80 and had to retire from professional cartoon work, Grant said. Still, he painted at home in Santa Fe.
“He loved the creative ferment of Santa Fe. We had constant parties at his house far into the night with a wide range of thinkers, musicians and writers,” said Hampton Sides, a Santa Fe-based writer and friend of Oliphant. “He enjoyed the constant interplay of ideas.”
With the current political environment, Grant said it seems society has lost the capacity to receive humor and debate and contrary opinions.
“My father challenged the idea of the political establishment being sublimely serious as it is,” Grant said. “We really need that in today’s America.”
