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Oliphant
Unpacking the Archive
"Politics itself, the nuts and bolts, never interested me as much as the people involved in it."
-- Pat Oliphant, 1998
In 2018, the UVA Library acquired almost 7,000 drawings, watercolors, prints, sculptures, and sketchbooks from Patrick and Susan Oliphant. Complementing the art is a wealth of archival material: correspondence, photographs, professional papers, scrapbooks, and recordings. This, the first exhibition to juxtapose the archive with Oliphant's artwork, shows how and why Oliphant became the most widely syndicated, most influential political cartoonist in America, shaping the political consciousness of generations.
What happens when a great artist takes up the profession of political cartooning and deploys all the weapons in his considerable arsenal to send a message? Endowed with a skepticism of the status quo, a love of drawing, and little formal training, Oliphant began his career at eighteen as a copy boy in Adelaide, Australia. When he joined the Denver Post in 1964 he introduced a linear fluency and wit -- a studied awareness of adversary traditions from Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier to David Low -- as well as an expansive imagination and conceptual reach as yet unknown to American newspaper audiences.
Oliphant's swift rise to prominence, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1967, was followed by five decades of sustained, uncompromising work. From Watergate to Bridgegate, from Duoshade to digital delivery, and from the ephemeral newspaper cartoon to the lasting medium of bronze, Oliphant's work both embraces its immediate context and transcends the particulars of time, place, and medium to reify universal traits of human character.
Today is a moment of great change for political commentary and visual satire. As newspapers continue to fold or merge, and the number of staff editorial cartoonists drops from hundreds to dozens nationally, Oliphant's archive will be essential for understanding the place of political cartoons in newsprint's last decades of dominance, and inspiring paths forward in an era of turbulent uncertainty. |