As President Obama takes office, completing an almost revolutionary change in our nation’s political status quo, the University’s Art Museum is recognizing the government’s transition with an exhibit of political cartoons from artist Patrick Oliphant.
The exhibit, entitled Leadership: Oliphant Cartoons and Sculpture from the Bush Years, features cartoons, pencil drawings, bronze and wax sculptures and an oversized charcoal drawing — drawn specifically for the exhibit while Oliphant was speaking to art students at the exhibit’s opening. The exhibit is accompanied by a smaller exhibit, With the Line of Daumier, which features many historical cartoons from Honoré Daumier, as well as quite a few prints from British, French and American cartoonists from the 18th to 20th centuries.
“The two exhibits represent a dialogue between past and present,” said Elizabeth Turner, acting museum director and vice provost for the arts.
This discourse shows the long history between art and social critics. For instance, Daumier was particularly known for his caricatures of political figures and his satire of typical French behavior in the 19th century. The Daumier pieces in the exhibit come from the University’s museum collection, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“Daumier is a predecessor of Oliphant’s, whom he considers very important to him,” said Art History Assoc. Prof. Matthew Affron, who also serves as the museum’s curator for modern art. “The relationship between Daumier and Oliphant makes for a rich presentation.” The influence of Daumier on the cartoons is evident, both in Oliphant’s drawings and in their satirical commentary and subject matter.
Oliphant was born in Australia in 1934 and immigrated to the United States in 1964, in the midst of one of our most divisive and controversial decades, which included the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of two of the nation’s most influential and beloved figures.
It was during this time that he began work at The Denver Post. In 1965, his comic was nationally and internationally syndicated, and he has since won the National Cartoonist Society’s Best Editorial Cartoonist Award seven times, the Pulitzer and the Thomas Nast Prize.
Oliphant is well-known for his political satire. “The exhibit features something contemporary with its historical context,” Affron said, noting that it juxtaposes Oliphant’s modern-day social commentary and Daumier’s precedent of using art as such a venue for discussion.
We have the unique right in our country to an entirely free press, which often provides the opportunity for extraordinary and impossible stories to be printed in tabloids, but also provides us with a venue through which the public can see the other side of the story. Through news stories and commentary in articles, and through paintings, sculpture and cartoons, we can hear from the undecided and the unconvinced. We can hear the opinions of the people who disagree, the minority opinion and even the people who disagree with them. Artists like Daumier and Oliphant have, throughout history, forced us to acknowledge these other opinions, forced us to question commonly held beliefs and understandings, and they have done so cleverly, with amusing candor.
“Oliphant emphasizes presentation as a medium of inquiry and communication,” Turner said. Two things without which there cannot be any sort of debate or discussion.
Leadership: Oliphant Cartoons and Sculpture from the Bush Years will be on display until March 8. The art museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m.
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