Pat Oliphant – RIP
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Editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant has passed away.
Patrick Bruce (Pat) Oliphant
July 24, 1935 – July 13, 2026
Cormac Dodd at The Sante Fe New Mexican is reporting the death of Pat Oliphant.
Pat Oliphant, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist whose cutting sketches critiqued power and corruption in U.S. politics over a lengthy career that made him one of the most recognizable and lauded artists in the newspaper business, died Monday morning.
He was 90 years old.
His son, Grant Oliphant, said he died at his home in Santa Fe after suffering from a variety of age-related illnesses.
Pat Oliphant was a widely admired and highly influential newspaper cartoonist whose work lampooned American powerbrokers — chronicling their missteps with his own brand of grim fury — from President Richard Nixon to President Donald Trump. He was often described as the most syndicated editorial cartoonist in the country, and his daily political cartoons once appeared in more than 500 publications worldwide.
The New York Times in 1990 called Oliphant “the most influential editorial cartoonist” of his time
Last year The Daily Cartoonist joined in celebrating Pat’s 90th birthday.
Pat Oliphant began his U.S. career at the Denver Post in 1964, in 1975 he moved to The Washington (DC) Star. After The Star folded in 1981 Oliphant went freelance and became, as The New Mexican above says, “the most syndicated editorial cartoonist in the country.”
“I think he was the best cartoonist of the last 100 years,” said Edward Sorel, a prominent magazine illustrator and friend of Oliphant. “There hasn’t been anybody like him.”
Born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1935, Oliphant got his professional start in 1955 as an in-house cartoonist at The Advertiser in his hometown. After nearly a decade he moved to the U.S., first landing at The Denver Post in Colorado in 1964
For six months in 1984, March to September, he created a Sunday comic strip featuring Punk, his penguin dingbat.
Bill Banowsky, owner of Sky Cinemas in Santa Fe and a filmmaker, produced A Savage Art [link added], a documentary on Oliphant’s life and work and on the art of political cartooning — a film Sky Cinemas will screen for a week starting Friday in honor of Oliphant.
Oliphant lost his eyesight around 2015 due to glaucoma and macular degeneration and retired from professional newspaper work, ending a career that ran from 1965 to 2015 — but he always continued to draw.
“His body of work is going to be analyzed and studied by scholars for a long time. He’s in the pantheon,” [historian and author] Sides said. “There’s maybe only five other political cartoonists that rival him.”
UPDATE
The New York Times obituary by Robert D. McFadden (or here).
A largely self-taught artist who also created bronze sculptures and painted in oils, Mr. Oliphant skewered powerful public officials and religious institutions with such boldness and acid wit that a Washington Post critic once said, “If Pat Oliphant couldn’t draw, he’d be an assassin.” In 1990, a profile in The New York Times Magazine called him “the most influential editorial cartoonist now working.”
His irreverence and his blunt, spare style, sometimes likened to that of Honoré Daumier, the 19th-century French caricaturist, was often imitated by other cartoonists. But he was also vilified by religious and civil rights groups for cartoons that his critics said not only crossed the lines of good taste but unfairly damaged the reputations of people and institutions — and that, at their worst, were racist.
Before Mr. Oliphant established himself as the nation’s most dominant political cartoonist…
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