Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When Hunter S Thompson first met Welsh artist Ralph Steadman at the Kentucky Derby in 1970, the writer described him as a “matted-haired geek covered with string warts”. Thompson had refused to work with a photographer, instead asking for an illustrator who could reflect the weirdness of the horse race and of his colourful prose. But Thompson also worried about Steadman. As he writes in The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved: “How would he bear up under the heinous culture shock of being lifted out of London and plunged into a drunken mob scene at the Kentucky Derby?” Quite well, as it turned out.The pair largely ignored the race and instead went on a drunken rampage through the city, Steadman coming dangerously close to brawling with locals because of his vulgar cartoon portrayals. It all ended with Thompson, who was growing frustrated with his counterpart, Macing Steadman and telling him: “Mace is too good for you . . . We can do without your kind in Kentucky.”Fifty years later, Steadman is far from Kentucky, putting on an exhibition titled INKling at the rather more sedate Historic Dockyard Chatham, a museum in south-east England. It covers his 60-year career, including his more recent work on extinct birds as well as his scabrous drawings for Thompson.“It was a good relationship [with Thompson] because we were as different as chalk and cheese and yet we got on,” says Steadman, 88, over Zoom. His hair is wispy white and he wears round spectacles and a blue shirt with a leopard-print waistcoat over the top. He speaks with the same sense of mischief that flows through his work.Despite the pair’s acrimony, they worked well together and shared a bond. As Thompson wrote in a letter to Steadman: “Nothing I write feels right without yr foul, dehumanized art looming over the words.” Much like Thompson’s writing, Steadman’s drawings had bite, and their report on the Derby was well received and helped birth a new journalistic style: gonzo. Its aim, Steadman says, was “to get under people’s skin and cause problems . . . Not to use violence but to use the violence of words and pictures.” However, Steadman’s career neither began nor ended with Thompson. The Chatham retrospective is split into four sections which delineate four of the most important facets of Steadman’s work: his illustrations for children, the Gonzovation Trilogy (a collaborative animal-based book series made with filmmaker and conservationist Ceri Levy), a literary section and — of course — gonzo. Steadman’s daughter Sadie, who helped plan the retrospective and sits in on our conversation, explains that it also boasts “a photographic reproduction of dad’s studio, three walls of it with a replica desk”. Steadman adds: “You can’t leave until you’ve sat down and done a full picture.”He says he was never interested in art as a child, but his practice started after he saw an advert for Percy V Bradshaw’s Press Art School and a cartoon course that particularly interested him. In his early career he produced political work for British publications including The Times, New Statesman and Private Eye.He was motivated to depict politicians because “so many of them were just full of bullshit.” His portraits included Richard Nixon as half-pig, half-man with faeces flying out of his rear; a Dracula-like Ronald Reagan dancing with a fearful Statue of Liberty; and racist politician Enoch Powell as a fly sitting on a pile of excrement. If it is hard to square this scatological style with the mild-mannered man himself, he tells me: “The harshness of my work is in fact the softness in me.”In the past Steadman described his pen as a weapon, an object which would torment the subjects of his scribbles. Now, he says, “it’s more of a gentle fun machine.” He produces children’s books and has illustrated covers for British classics such as Animal Farm and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.Thompson warned him not to write because “you’ll bring shame on your family”, but that didn’t stop Steadman. He has written a number of books, including a memoir of his time with Thompson and I, Leonardo, for which he attempted to live for a time like Leonardo da Vinci to better understand the artist and tell his life story. This included painting a replica of “The Last Supper” on his bedroom wall, which took almost a year.The eclectic range of Steadman’s work has not fallen away. In 2017 he produced a cover for Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho, an album by American rappers Travis Scott and Quavo. He also portrayed Breaking Bad’s Walter White for a series of limited-edition box sets and created an ironically nauseating cover for Anthony Bourdain’s first cookbook, Appetites. But he remains best known for his work with Thompson, above all his illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which told of a journey of chaos and destruction and the death of the American dream. Steadman slashed together a set of drawings that complemented the visceral, grotesque madness of Thompson’s prose. Images of a ghostly Raoul Duke — the book’s protagonist, closely based on Thompson — speeding across the desert or throwing up thick, inky vomit were punctuated with blots flying across the page. As much a stylistic choice, these marks arose from Steadman throwing his pen down in frustration. “It’s horrible having an empty page,” he says. “You’ve got to splash it or do something with it.” Steadman and Thompson remained friends until the writer’s suicide in 2005. As Sadie recalls: “The sound of the 1980s was the fax machine going in the middle of the night and you’d wake up and there’d be reams and reams of rolls of messages from Hunter.” After the interview, she sends me some of these faxes. One of them finds Thompson summing up Steadman’s work, perhaps better than anyone else could: “yr art, of course, is like being stabbed in the ass from behind in a crowded pub.”September 21-November 17, thedockyard.co.uk
