An Atypical Cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, Is the Subject of What Must Be Called a Typical Documentary

Among the benefits of having been born-and-raised at Salt Lake City, Utah, was my parents’ subscription to the Salt Lake Tribune. As a child, the news of the day couldn’t have mattered less to me, but the comics and movie listings were plentiful: Riffling through them made eating my morning bowl of Grape Nuts an event worth looking forward to. At some point, I noticed that there were single-panel comics on the editorial page and, through them, began to familiarize myself with the politics of the day — largely through the efforts of one cartoonist, Pat Oliphant.Just who was this creature with the odd name and what was up with those wild drawings? Mr. Oliphant’s cartoons were rambunctious, elastic, and unsparing in their details. Caricature isn’t inherently a cruel avocation — were that the case, any number of artisans offering portrait drawings on our city streets would be out of work — but anatomical exaggerations can elaborate upon and underscore the physical and moral character of a person. The novelist Joseph Conrad noted that caricature “is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.” Few artists have joked quite as fiercely as Mr. Oliphant.Bill Banowsky’s new documentary, “A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant,” pays homage to an atypical talent through means that are, one must say, typical. Mr. Banowsky has done his leg work marshalling the facts, absolutely, but the resulting picture is conventional in cinematic structure. Documentary footage is juxtaposed with contemporary interviews, all of which is formatted within discrete segments covering this-or-that aspect of the artist’s biography and work. Dutiful, our filmmaker is, and kind of poky too.Still, those who prize Mr. Oliphant’s scabrous humor and exemplary draftsmanship will find their collective good taste confirmed by each and every chapter of “A Savage Art.” The headings to these sections feature an animated version of the pickle-nosed gremlin who punctuated the margins of Mr. Oliphant’s cartoons. “Punk” was based on a penguin that a colleague brought to the office, a visitation that inspired Mr. Oliphant to employ a character in his panels that provided commentary on the matter at hand. Alternately bemused, stunned, or despairing, Punk added a sharp frisson of emphasis to an already pointed illustration.A political cartoon by Pat Oliphant from ‘A Savage Art.’ Via Magnolia PicturesMr. Oliphant is Australian by birth and American by choice. His career as a cartoonist began when the editors of an Adelaide newspaper, the Advertiser, noticed that the copy boy was a deft hand with drawing. After plying his trade close to home for over a decade, the artist up-and-moved his family of four to the United States, having gotten a job as an in-house cartoonist at the Denver Post. Ten years and one Pulitzer prize later, Mr. Oliphant again moved kith-and-kin — this time to his adopted homeland’s seat of power, Washington, D.C. The move did wonders career-wise: Mr. Oliphant was at the center of the political universe and even got himself invited to the White House. President Ford took a shine to the cartoonist’s depiction of him as a galumphing klutz with a band-aid on his forehead. Not all presidents were happy with Mr. Oliphant’s caricatures: George Herbert Walker Bush — who suffered, you might recall, from the “wimp factor” — disliked that he was forever portrayed wielding a purse. Nor was Mr. Oliphant happy with all presidents, though Nixon’s physiognomy and Clinton’s philandering offered an abundance of comic material.Family-wise, the move to the nation’s capital was complicated: Mr. Oliphant soon divorced and his responsibilities as a parent increasingly took second place to the imperatives of his art. All the while, his line became more fluid, his hatching more assured, and his use of chiaroscuro operatic. A leap in skill corresponded with a wit that gained in acidity, outrageousness, and, at moments, profundity. Mr. Oliphant created some 10,000 political cartoons during his lifetime and a gratifying number of them are seen during the run of Mr. Banowsky’s film. All of which goes to confirm that he has more than earned a place alongside masters of the form like James Gillray, Thomas Nast, and Honore Daumier. “A Savage Art” is an informative and entertaining testament.

An Atypical Cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, Is the Subject of What Must Be Called a Typical Documentary

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