Ralph Steadman Made Gonzo History With Thompson. Now A Book And Museum Expo Tells His Story

When artist Ralph Steadman does an impression of his late gonzo co-conspirator Hunter S. Thompson—as he often does—the sound he makes is more canine than human. 

“Ralph! Ralph!” he barks in an irritated monotone, affectionately mimicking the author’s voice. “Why don’t you give up writing and stick to your scribbling!”

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Steadman, who turns 90 on May 15, has now outlived Thompson by 21 years, but their friendship and many collaborations represent some of the central events of his life. Together, combining Steadman’s drawings with Thompson’s words, they made some alarming literary history, delivering savage humor with a harsh, critical look at contemporary society, politics, sports, war, and peace.

Their books included Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, and The Curse of Lono, plus many articles for Rolling Stone and various other publications. What they shared was a certain intensity and attraction to chaos, shown in both the language and Steadman’s illustrations, which were marked with great splashes of ink and paint.

“Oh, chaos is kind of fascinating,” Steadman says in a video call from his home in Kent, England, white-haired and bundled in a fleece jacket. “It’s lovely if you get control over a little bit of chaos and make it a part of the picture. It explodes in the work, and that’s kind of fun. Well, it’s definitely fun.”

His amusement can be felt in the pages of a career-spanning new book, Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing…, and a traveling museum exhibition of the same name. Both were drawn from 16,000 original works he has kept stored in his home studio, making the exhibition a rare opportunity to see the artwork in person. 

After coming to a close at the Torrance Art Museum in Southern California, the show now heads to the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, where it opens August 26. The works are larger than many visitors expect.

“It’s just for space so you can go like that,” he says, flinging his arm in a motion he has used to send random splashes across the paper. “You feel more like an athlete throwing your weight around.” 

Sitting beside him is the youngest of his adult children, Sadie Williams, who co-curated the show and is its traveling caretaker. Steadman doesn’t fly overseas much anymore. As a dark gray cat named after Ozzy Osbourne wanders the room, Sadie is on the call to help with details of And Another Thing…, and with Steadman’s uncertain memory.

“It’s weird how your memory just goes somewhere else,” says Steadman. “I don’t know whether it’ll come back.”

Yet some moments from the past remain vivid in Steadman’s mind. He laughs at one memory of when Thompson visited this home in the mid-1980s, as they worked on Lono. Thompson hit his head as he came into the kitchen from the back door, barking, “Goddamn servant’s quarters!” 

They famously first met in 1970 at the Kentucky Derby, where Thompson was on assignment from Scanlan’s. The magazine originally offered the illustrator gig to another cartoonist who was unavailable, and Steadman happened to already be in the U.S. He traveled to the Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville and found in Thompson a shared taste for savage humor. 

Together, they depicted a scene of Southern high society and low morals on Derby Day. While both were already years into their careers, the finished piece, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” was a defining moment for each of them, introducing a style in writing and chaotic artwork that Thompson eventually called “gonzo journalism.”

“So it was very serendipitous,” says Sadie. 

“I just didn’t get into drugs with Hunter,” says Steadman. “That’s the most important thing. Otherwise, I would’ve gone completely [mad]. It’s the one thing I stayed away from really.”

Not that Steadman escaped that influence completely. In their second magazine assignment together, they traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, for the 1970 America’s Cup yacht race. Steadman was feeling seasick, so Thompson gave him a pill that turned out to be psilocybin, the psychedelic drug.

Under the influence, and looking to spice up the story, they conspired to paddle out in a dinghy and spray paint “Fuck the Pope” on the side of Australia’s million-dollar racing yacht, the Gretel. “But I didn’t do it, thank God, as it would’ve been imprisonment, I think,” says Steadman. “I wouldn’t have been allowed back in America.”

In that era, Steadman and Thompson both drew inspiration from the nefarious character they saw in President Richard Nixon, who presided over the later years of the Vietnam War and urban unrest in American cities, before resigning in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In Steadman’s drawings, Nixon is a grotesque figure, “a jowly storm cloud in a cheap suit, sweating paranoia and patriotism in equal measure,” as the artist has described him. 

“He was a kind of evil son of a bitch, really,” Steadman says now. “I was quite keen to do things then to save the world from people like Nixon, who really was a pretty horrible character. We’ve got a couple over here now [like that].”

The book and show include some of Steadman’s earliest professional work, such as the single-panel newspaper comics he produced in the 1950s called “Smile with STEAD” and “Teeny.” It’s amusing but fairly conservative work, not even hinting at the madness to come. His mother mainly wondered why he signed them as “STEAD.”

“My mother said, ‘But your name is Steadman. Are you ashamed of it?’” the artist recalls. “So that’s why I put the ‘man’ on there. I couldn’t bear upsetting my mother, you know.” 

His signature has read “STEADman” ever since.

As the 1960s unfolded, his work began to veer into extremes to fit the times. “It just got weirder and, in a way, much more interesting. It became more interesting as a career.”

While his fame in the U.S. owed much to his work with Thompson, he also produced cartoons of political satire for U.K. newspapers and created lavish new illustrations for some literary classics: George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. He has also published several books of vivid original works, including explorations of the lives and ideas of Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci.

Many years ago, he stopped sending out his original drawings to publications, mainly because too often they were never returned. Steadman learned to mail transparencies, and later, digital scans, instead.

“When I first started working, people used to take it. You never saw it after it was published,” the artist says. “It really was a bit of a swindle. People would just pinch your work.” 

Over the years, he has grumbled about losing possession of original drawings for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, originally published in Rolling Stone. They are now in the collection of the magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner.

Sadie turns to her father. “No, they weren’t pinched,” she corrects him. “You actually did agree to sell them. Don’t start.”

“Oh, did I?” Steadman replies. “Oh, hell.”

“I know you’ve regretted it, but you did actually agree to sell them to Jann Wenner,” she goes on. “And even though you don’t think you’ve got very much for them, if you think about it, they were hanging in the Rolling Stone offices for decades. Think about all the people who walked through those offices and saw them.”

Steadman first came to the United States in 1970 in search of work, and found endless inspiration. It can be seen throughout the new book, with drawings of hot rods, costumed characters at Disneyland, and American politics. “It was just an extraordinary place,” he recalls. “It was the new modern. … The politicians seemed to be bigger criminals than they are in England.” 

By then, he had more than a decade of experience. As an illustrator, he was already working by the time he began attending art classes in 1959. 

“I owe a lot of it to Leslie Richardson, who was a wonderful art teacher,” recalls Steadman. “He took in myself and Gerald Scarfe to be students, and we used to go every week to draw under his surveillance. That was the best thing we could have done—you really couldn’t have better training than that, unless you wanted to go on to university and get clever.”

Sadie interjects, “You did get an honorary doctorate from the University of Kent.”

Her father laughs and says, “Well, of all the things to get.”

Steadman’s work has sometimes been compared to that of Scarfe, best known in the U.S. for his work illustrating Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Scarfe was godfather to Steadman’s oldest child,  and they were close early in their careers, but they had a falling out in the 1960s.

People often ask Sadie what it was like to grow up with Steadman as a father known for depicting madness and dementia on the page. 

“So many people think, ‘Oh my God, he must be absolutely insane,’” Sadie says. “Well, no, he is putting that out on the paper. And he’s only going after the people he thinks are really dastardly and holding up a mirror and going, This is you. He goes after their deeds more than anything else.”

Steadman nods thoughtfully. “Bullies are pretty horrendous people generally in any profession—you know, professors, doctors, anyone that pushes and shoves and is unpleasant,” he says. “My mother was never like that, and I learned from my mother.”

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