37 Facts About Pat Oliphant

Patrick Bruce "Pat" Oliphant was born on 24 July 1935 and is an Australian-born American artist whose career spanned more than sixty years.

Pat Oliphant was raised in a small cabin in Aldgate, in the Adelaide Hills.

Pat Oliphant's father worked as a draftsman for the government, and Oliphant credited him with sparking his interest in drawing.

In 1952, while still a teenager, Pat Oliphant began his career in journalism as a copy boy at Adelaide's evening tabloid newspaper, The News, which had recently been inherited by Rupert Murdoch.

Pat Oliphant had no interest in attending college, as he had an ambivalent relationship with formal education and already knew he wanted to be a journalist.

In 1959, Pat Oliphant traveled to the United States and Great Britain to learn about cartooning in those countries.

Pat Oliphant decided he wanted to move to the United States, but he had to wait five years until his contract with The Advertiser expired.

Pat Oliphant sent a portfolio of work to the Post and was hired over 50 American applicants.

Pat Oliphant moved to the United States with his wife, Hendrika DeVries, and their two children.

Pat Oliphant's reputation grew rapidly, and in 1967, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his 1 February 1966 cartoon They Won't Get Us To The Conference Table.

Pat Oliphant had intentionally submitted what he considered one of the weakest cartoons he had published that year.

Pat Oliphant refused to be considered for the award again and became a regular critic of the Pulitzer.

In 1975, Pat Oliphant moved to The Washington Star, attracted by editor Jim Bellows.

Pat Oliphant was the first political cartoonist in the twentieth century to work independently from a home newspaper, which provided him with unique independence from editorial control.

Pat Oliphant married Susan C Conway in 1996, and they remain married today.

In 2004, Pat Oliphant moved from Washington, DC to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In 2012, Pat Oliphant was the Roy Lichtenstein Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome for three months.

Pat Oliphant has specialized in caricaturing American presidents, and multiple exhibitions have featured his work organized by presidential administration.

Pat Oliphant developed specific tropes for various presidents: His dark, brooding Nixon is sometimes depicted naked and ashamed, covering his privates like Adam and Eve, and at other times making the "Victory" sign.

Pat Oliphant regularly portrayed the accident-prone Gerald Ford with a bandage on his forehead.

Pat Oliphant famously portrayed Barack Obama as an Easter Island head worshiped by voters.

Early in his career, Pat Oliphant began to include a small penguin in almost every one of his political cartoons.

Pat Oliphant decided to include a penguin in his cartoon as a result.

In 1984, Pat Oliphant briefly drew a full-color comic strip featuring Punk for the Sunday funnies, titled Sunday Punk, but found the work too laborious and soon discontinued the strip.

Pat Oliphant originally created Punk as a space for subversion in the conservative editorial environment of the Adelaide Advertiser.

Pat Oliphant has often stated that his job is to criticize, and he deliberately avoids getting to know his subjects for fear of liking them.

Pat Oliphant has often remarked on his intention to draw criticism from all political perspectives and has indeed received strong criticism from ethnic and religious groups for some of his cartoons.

In 2005, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee expressed concern that some of Pat Oliphant's caricatures were racist and misleading.

In 1987, Pat Oliphant protested the selection of Berkeley Breathed for the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

Pat Oliphant has worked in pen and ink, oil, lithography, and other media.

Pat Oliphant began working in bronze in the early 1980s and produced a significant body of work throughout the remainder of his career.

Pat Oliphant's sculptures vary in scale, from a diminutive Jimmy Carter to a larger-than-life depiction of Angelina Eberly, an important figure in the famous Texas Archive War, which is located on the sidewalk along Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, near the Capitol.

Pat Oliphant is the nephew of Sir Mark Pat Oliphant, the Australian physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II and later became the Governor of South Australia.

Pat Oliphant enjoys flying and holds a commercial pilot's certificate.

Pat Oliphant has been a longtime member of the Bad Golfers Association.

Pat Oliphant's papers are housed at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

Pat Oliphant's works are held in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, National Portrait Gallery, Gerald R Ford Presidential Museum, George W Bush Presidential Library, the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.