‘Style Is Nothing’: How Ralph Steadman Transformed Cartooning Into High Gonzo Art

You know a Ralph Steadman work when you see it. You’ll recognize his chaotic line and evocative paint splatter, his grotesque visages and uncanny vistas. But for an artist with such a pointedly distinct aesthetic, Steadman won’t entertain any talk about style.

“Style is nothing, only what it looks like,” he told me over a video call. “It’s just a second thought, really. It’s more about content.”

And in a career that’s spanned more than six decades, the British artist has doggedly pursued that content. His work has spanned political cartoons and illustrations for children’s books. He has traced the life of Sigmund Freud as he has the adventures of Hunter S. Thompson, effectively wedding a look to the journalist’s brand of gonzo storytelling. Lately, he’s painted a series of extinct animals.

The breadth and depth of Steadman’s oeuvre comes to the fore at the new touring exhibition “And Another Thing,” which just opened at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, D.C. Gathered here are more than 140 objects—from satirical portraits to a life-sized bronze sculpture—that detail not just his varied subject matter, but his efforts in drawing out the forms of cartooning and illustration.

“It’s about everything you’re doing and how much you’re putting into a drawing to form it,” he explained.

Born in 1936 in the town of Wallasey in the U.K., Steadman had his earliest brush with illustration in the late 1950s, when he answered a magazine advertisement that trumpeted: “You too can learn to draw and earn £££s!” It was for a course led by illustrator Percy Bradshaw; Steadman, then a teenager, had gained some experience in technical drawing during a brief stint as an apprentice engineer at an aircraft company. He was intrigued. Alas, the class was “old-fashioned,” said Steadman, remembering griping to Bradshaw, who countered, “Oh, but the principles of drawing never change, my boy.”

Steadman’s earliest works, for publications including Punch and Private Eye, were provocative cartoons that took aim at the political powers that be—shrewd creations that advanced the U.K.’s satire boom of the 1960s.

“Cartoons can be quite incisive and informative, all those things,” he said. “I like to think I did my best to educate the world for a bit and just notice something that somebody else might not have noticed.”

Still, Steadman agitated within the bounds of cartooning. Under the mentorship of his art teacher Leslie Richardson at East Ham Technical College, he had cultivated a huge cultural appetite—for photography, art history, literature, philosophy—that fueled his creative experiments. His discovery of Dada and its associated artists, including Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz, and Kurt Schwitters, dared him to be more confrontational in both subject and medium.

That shift is visible at “And Another Thing,” where Steadman’s pithy line drawings from the early 1960s give way to exploding paint blots, collage, manic hand lettering, and expansive canvases. A wall crammed with vivid portraits illustrates his knack for caricature as much as his play with styles: Oscar Wilde is depicted in a spare Beardsley-style drawing, Karl Marx has paint specks for a beard, while an image of Federico García Lorca has been assembled with bespattered pages from Steadman’s drawing board.

Cartooning, Steadman is quoted in accompanying wall text, could be “a vehicle for expression of some sort of protest, or it’s actually a way of saying something which you cannot necessarily say in words.”

What stars must have aligned, then, for Steadman to find Thompson, the iconoclast known for his volatile prose and equally unfettered approach to reportage. In 1970, the author was sent by Scanlan’s Monthly to cover the Kentucky Derby and requested an illustrator with “a serious kink in his brain”; Steadman was in turn asked by the magazine’s art director if he wanted to work with “an ex-Hell’s Angel who just shaved his head.” To say they got along well would be understating it.

After connecting in Kentucky, Steadman would go on to travel with Thompson as he covered the America’s Cup sailing competition and the Honolulu Marathon, and illustrate the journalist’s books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973). Thompson also bought Steadman’s farm (which Sadie Williams, Steadman’s daughter, told me turned into a “gonzo mecca”).

They shared hijinks. During the boat race in Newport, Rhode Island, Thompson slipped Steadman a hallucinogenic when the artist asked for anti-seasickness medication. Once zonked, the pair rowed out to spray paint “Fuck the Pope” on the hull of a boat. When they were spotted by police and had to flee, Thompson decided a diversion was called for. He set off a distress flare, which ignited a fire on another yacht. Steadman made it back to shore without his shoes.

The late Thompson remains close to Steadman’s heart. During our conversation, he recalled how the author was fascinated by his chin beard, calling it a “weird growth,” and the way he would bark his name: “ROLF!” On each anniversary of Thompson’s death, Steadman paints a blot in commemoration. Thompson’s presence at “And Another Thing” takes the form of suitably frenzied portraits and a large bronze sculpture, created by artist Jud Bergeron after one of Steadman’s most iconic cartoons of the gonzo journalist.

“He always said obvious things, but also perceptive things,” Steadman remembered of Thompson. “It’s very odd that I should meet that crazy American. He was the best of all the people I could meet in America.”

It’s not surprising for Steadman to be so immersed in the worlds of his subjects. During a tour of the exhibition with Williams, also the executive director of the Ralph Steadman Art Collection, she pointed out how her father followed Freud’s footsteps throughout Vienna for Sigmund Freud (1979) and how he visited farms to better illustrate George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

“When you look at the books, you can see how that authenticity pays off within the artworks themselves,” said Williams. “There’s an awful lot of reality, however imaginative and crazy some of the drawings seem, which is really grounding.”

Most notable were the three years Steadman spent researching Leonardo da Vinci, one of his heroes, for the 1983 volume I, Leonardo. Williams, then 11, remembered him creating the series of paintings while nursing a broken leg. “He did it all sitting in our front room with his leg propped up and a big drawing board and all his inks,” she said. “He wanted the perspective of being Leonardo because he didn’t feel anyone had ever done that before.”

To do so, Steadman also created works in egg tempera as Leonardo did and even built a gliding device after one of his designs; he traveled to Italy as well. His images of the Renaissance master are playful yet poignant, capturing the polymath painting the Mona Lisa and crafting one of his flying machines, among other scenes. Here, Steadman’s grasp of technical drawing is brought to bear alongside his observational eye and command of tone.

“I was trying to educate myself,” said Steadman of his deep research. “When you educate yourself, you do a better job, because you know what you’re trying to think of. You almost think about what it is you’re going to think about.”

The rest of “And Another Thing” is stacked full of Steadman’s many other projects, pulled from an archive that today numbers up to 16,000 pieces. There are his paintings for his children’s books The Little Red Computer (1969) and Jelly Book (1970); his striking illustrations for U.K. wine merchant Oddbins; his experiments with manipulating Polaroids to create freakish caricatures; and his NFTs. Steadman’s hand is recognizable throughout.

In this way, the exhibition is aptly titled. It borrows a phrase that Steadman kept repeating to exhibition coordinator Andrea Harris during the planning of the show, but fittingly alludes to the sheer scope of works on view as much as the artist’s restlessness. It’s the rare cartoonist, after all, who can mine the medium’s riches, while adding to—and transforming—it.

“Cartooning hasn’t changed a lot over the years, but I think I have. Some people are quite happy to do a simple thing every day, like a small pocket cartoon,” Steadman reflected. “I was more interested in trying to be expressive. I just thought of something, then I thought of something else. It is, in a way, kind of art, isn’t it?”