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An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire
An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire
Patrick Oliphant was born in Australia in 1935. As a teenager he began working for a newspaper in Adelaide as a copy boy, and soon showed an interest in drawing, leading to his first editorial cartoons. In 1964 he was hired as a cartoonist with the Denver Post and moved to the U.S. He would soon be nationally syndicated, and for the next 50 years was one of the nation’s most recognizable editorial cartoonists. Starting in 1990, Oliphant began spending annual periods in residence at the Wallace House Center for Journalists at the University of Michigan, where he drew a wide range of sketches of American political figures. This exhibit puts some of those original sketches created during Oliphant’s visits to Ann Arbor into conversation with examples of political satire from the Clements Library’s collection to highlight four key themes in American politics: Capability, Character, Corruption, and Humiliation.
Political satire is not a gentle art—it is meant to leave a mark. Since the heyday of James Gillray and William Hogarth in 18th-century England, visual satirists have been able to “say” things about political leaders in their illustrations that would get writers censored (or worse). As such, it has played an important role in American political culture for over two centuries. Many of the qualities that we most readily associate with political leaders in our past come to us from satirical illustrations, not from things those leaders actually did. This exhibit invites you to think about how visual satire has shaped the way you think about political life in America. What can visual artists say about politics that writers can’t? What role does visual satire play in American political life in an age when most of what we read (and see) is online, rather than in a newspaper?
Thanks to the Wallace House Center for Journalists for the loan of these original drawings; to Lynette Clemetson, Director of Wallace House; and Charles Eisendrath, former Director of Wallace House and member of the Clements Library Associates Board of Governors.
