Pat Oliphant

Patrick Bruce Oliphant was born on 24 July 1935 in Maylands, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. His parents were Donald Knox Oliphant, a draftsman for the state's Ministry of Lands, and Grace Lillian Oliphant (nee Price) of Rosslyn Park. The family lived in a three-room cabin in Aldgate in the Adelaide Hills, with no electricity or running water.

Oliphant credited his father with sparking his interest in drawing; his father also kept scrapbooks of his son's early work, which are now in the University of Virginia archive. He was a nephew of Sir Mark Oliphant, the physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later served as Governor of South Australia. He had a brother, John.

Oliphant began his schooling in a one-room schoolhouse and went on to Unley High School in Adelaide. He disliked formal education and had no interest in university, because he already knew he wanted to work in newspapers. He was largely self-taught as an artist. Later in life he took figure drawing classes with William Christenberry at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, beginning in 1988, and in 1981 Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

Oliphant started in 1952 as a copy boy at The News, Adelaide's evening tabloid. In 1955 he joined The Advertiser, where he produced cartoons and illustrations. Frustrated by vetoes of his Australian political cartoons, he turned to international affairs and created the penguin Punk as a voice for his own views.

In 1964 he was hired by The Denver Post to replace Paul Conrad, chosen over more than 50 American applicants. His work was syndicated internationally by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate from April 1965, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1967. He moved to The Washington Star in 1975, joined Universal Press Syndicate in 1980, and after the Star closed in 1981 chose to work independently without a home newspaper, relying on syndication. By 1983 he appeared in more than 500 newspapers, making him the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the United States.

He cut back to four cartoons a week by 1995 and three a week by 2014, and retired from syndication in January 2015 as his eyesight failed. He came out of retirement briefly in February 2017 with two cartoons for The Nib about Donald Trump and Steve Bannon.

Oliphant's mature style was instantly recognisable: long-faced, grotesquely distorted caricatures, sparse labels, dramatic camera angles and a wide horizontal format that other cartoonists copied. Rick Marschall wrote in 1999 that the Oliphant look still dominated the field. He specialised in presidents and admitted that it took him about six months to find the right face for a new one.

In a corner of almost every cartoon sat Punk, a small penguin inspired by a bird a colleague brought back from South Australia's south coast. Punk often talked with another tiny figure and added a second layer of commentary, sometimes bemused and sometimes trenchant. In 1984 Oliphant briefly drew a colour Sunday strip called Sunday Punk but found it too laborious and stopped.

From the early 1980s Oliphant produced bronze sculpture, often compared with the work of the French caricaturist Honore Daumier. His bronzes include Nixon on Horseback, Reagan on Horseback, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, several held by the National Portrait Gallery, and Naked Nixon at the Phillips Collection. His 2004 statue of Angelina Eberly, the heroine of the Texas Archive War, stands on Congress Avenue in Austin.

He also worked in oils, pen and ink, lithography and aquatint, drew for Rolling Stone, illustrated books, and published more than 20 cartoon collections, from The Oliphant Book (1969) to When We Can't See The Forest for the Bushes (2001). Exhibitions of his work were held at the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and the University of Virginia.

Oliphant moved to the United States in 1964 with his first wife, Hendrika DeVries, and their two children. He became a naturalised American citizen in 1979. He married his second wife, Mary Ann Kuhn, in 1983; they divorced in 1994. In 1996 he married Susan Conway, a Georgetown gallery owner and conservator who became his business manager and spent decades organising his archive. She died in December 2025.

He had three children, Grant, Laura and Susanne, and two stepchildren, Pauline and Daniel Conway, as well as four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He was left-handed and a vegetarian, held a commercial pilot's certificate, and was a longtime member of the Bad Golfers Association. Between 1997 and 2004 he moved his home and studio from Washington, D.C., to Santa Fe, New Mexico, settling near Canyon Road along the old Acequia Madre.

Oliphant saw political cartooning as a calling rather than a business. He said a cartoonist could say what a writer could not, and he described his process as fuelled by anger, saying, "I bring myself to a boil every day." He refused to befriend politicians, believing friendship would blunt his work, and he aimed his pen at every party and ideology.

He was also an outspoken critic of the Pulitzer board, both over his own 1967 prize and in 1987, when he protested the award to Berkeley Breathed, arguing that editorial cartooning was a serious journalistic pursuit that should not be confused with comic strips. Late in life he said Donald Trump was bad for the country but good for cartoons.

Oliphant courted backlash, and many cartoons drew protests. Catholic readers objected to a 1993 Christmas Eve cartoon linking priests and child abuse, and his 20 March 2002 cartoon about "St. Pedophilia's" sparked national debate; some papers declined to run it. The Catholic League called him one of the most anti-Catholic cartoonists ever published.

In 2001 the Asian American Journalists Association accused him of racial caricature, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee raised similar concerns in 2005. A 2005 cartoon of Condoleezza Rice as a parrot on George W. Bush's shoulder was criticised for its depiction of her features. In March 2009 the Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned a cartoon about Israel's offensive in Gaza and asked websites to remove it.

Oliphant won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1967. The National Cartoonists Society gave him the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1968 and 1972 and its editorial cartoon award seven times between 1971 and 1991. Other honours include the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award (1966), the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1974), an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College (1981), the Thomas Nast Prize (1992), Washington Journalism Review cartoonist of the year (twice), the Inkpot Award (2009) and induction into the Australian Cartoonists Hall of Fame (2009). On 30 November 2012 he was made an honorary Officer of the Order of Australia for service to the arts and to Australia's relations with the United States.

Oliphant is remembered as one of the most influential editorial cartoonists in American history. Curator Harry Katz called him one of history's finest comic artists, and Jake Tapper called him "the GOAT" after his death. His drawing style, use of the horizontal panel and his tiny commentator Punk shaped a generation of cartoonists.

In 2018 he and Susan Conway Oliphant gave his archive, including more than 6,000 daily cartoon drawings, sketchbooks, sculptures and the Denver Post printing plate of his Pulitzer cartoon, to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. The archive inspired the 2019 exhibition "Oliphant: Unpacking the Archive" and a 2020 symposium on the future of political cartoons. His work is also held by the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum and the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Filmmaker Bill Banowsky, a Santa Fe neighbour and friend, made the documentary "A Savage Art: The Life and Cartoons of Pat Oliphant", released in 2025 after a work-in-progress screening at the University of Virginia and a showing at the Virginia Film Festival. Oliphant was interviewed by Morley Safer for CBS Sunday Morning in 2000 and appeared many times on C-SPAN demonstrating his technique. After his death, Sky Cinemas in Santa Fe scheduled a week of screenings of the documentary in his honour.

Pat Oliphant died on the morning of Monday 13 July 2026 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 90. His son Grant Oliphant said he had been suffering from a variety of age-related illnesses. He had lost much of his sight to glaucoma and macular degeneration about a decade earlier. His wife, Susan Conway Oliphant, had died in December 2025. Tributes came from the University of Virginia Library, the Australian Cartoonists Association, The Denver Post, fellow journalists and readers who had grown up with his cartoons.