“And Another Thing” a traveling retrospective on the work of Ralph Steadman—the artist who will be forever known as “The guy who did the drawings for Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”—has appeared at the (surprisingly fearless) Torrance Art Museum. It is uncomplicatedly good that Steadman has a retrospective—he is a talent of the first rank, and a man whose had far more influence than his relatively slim claim on fame might imply. However, like most forms of wider cultural recognition for artists who make their work outside the gallery scene, it comes far too late—Steadman is 89—and, in a variety of ways, this exhibition is also far too little.
The show arrives at the modest halls of TAM dripping with all the fanfare and marginalia characteristic of a didactic exhibition on the subject of a great man—there is a massive bronze statue based on Steadman’s iconic drawing of Hunter S. Thompson (Vintage Dr Gonzo, 2015), extensive and informative biographical wall text, Steadman-illustrated books out and available for the public to peruse, and decals decorating the walls with Steadman’s signature ink-spatters alongside early print editions, studio artifacts and other memorabilia stacked attractively and vertiginously in plexiglass vitrines. This delightful window-dressing almost obscures the fact that Steadman’s best, most influential and most distinctive work is nowhere to be found.
Steadman’s own account of the fate of the Fear and Loathing drawings appears in wall text alongside such representation of that work as the exhibitors could scrape together:
What actually happened was that Rolling Stone paid me $1500 for the use of all the drawings (about 24 of them) and then offered to buy the originals off me, which my agent urged, ‘was a good move!’. He sold the whole damn treasure trove to [Rolling Stone publisher] Jann Wenner for the princely sum of 60 dollars per drawing. I rue the day I let him convince me.
Did Wenner or his people refuse to lend them back for the show? Did they demand an unreasonable insurance arrangement? Had the drawings been sold off by Wenner long ago? At any rate, for fiscal or logistical reasons the cream of Steadman’s 1970s work—the drawings accompanying Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the like—are barely represented. This is an outrage. They are a showcase of everything that is most powerful in Steadman—the energetic and disquieting juxtaposition of precise, if notational, ink draughtmandship with jagged, frenzied, spattered grotesquerie which summons a Francis-Bacon-esque injection of visceral psychological intensity into otherwise recognizable scenes. This lacuna creates a near-fatal empty center in the exhibition which is already too small and appearing in venues far too obscure.
What’s left is interesting if you’re already a fan. The first wall has an impressive archive of Steadman’s coming-of-age—in school and with British illustration clients like the long-lived humor magazine Punch (including an intriguing wheel-shaped, hand-drawn board for a game no-one ever made). The large second room is filled with later work, often for Steadman-conceived series and illustrated books. Illustrators in their dotage are expected to draw children’s classic and portraits of their highbrow heroes (Lorca, Marx, etc.) and Steadman dutifully complied. The line is assured and the spatters deftly deployed, but the glorious savagery is all gone. A goofball king marching behind a blue toucan wears an outfit in white dalmatianed by black ink spots which communicate the king’s…madness? Silliness? Quirkiness? Impossible to say. It didn’t used to be.
Image: Courtesy Torrance Art Museum