Ralph Steadman: I’ve changed the world, it’s worse!
When the 1960s turned from dream to nightmare, Ralph Steadman was there to draw it. His style has since become iconic. Now a major documentary captures his recent life as a mixture of chaos and celebrity – and a new exhibition of his work reveals photography from the early years of gonzo journalism that had been buried in his files.
I caught up with Steadman, now aged 78, at the London gallery where his work is being shown. He told me how he’d made the transition from draughtsman in an aircraft factory to defining figure in graphic journalism.
“We were invited to a cartoon club to meet Vicky,” he says. Viktor “Vicky” Weisz, the left-wing newspaper cartoonist who was the scourge of politics in the 1940s and 50s, impressed Steadman with the “clarity and simplicity” of his images. So how do we get from there to the ink-splattered intricacies of Steadman’s own work?
“It’s like Paul Klee said: you are taking a line for a walk and that’s what I like to do – or blot.”
But when Steadman takes a line for a walk it often crosses line after line into a zone of deep discomfort for the subject.
“Yes,” he says. “If there are people there who deserve being criticised I think it’s fair game.”
As to the hardest hit he’s ever landed: “I think it was the melting face of Richard Nixon.”
Steadman’s Nixon, which made the cover of Rolling Stone, was just one of many dark portraits of politicians he produced in the 1970s.
“I felt they were evil, I was absolutely outraged by them,” he says, in a room surrounded by sketches of US presidents Ford, Nixon and Reagan. “They were doing the wrong thing. They were supposed to be public figures in control of governing the country – not manipulating it, governing it.”
Steadman was in at the birth of gonzo journalism. He toured the streets of New York snapping random beggars. Then, in 1970, he met possibly the most random person on earth, Hunter S Thompson, at the Kentucky Derby.
Steadman and Thompson spread a rumour among the white southern crowd that the Black Panthers were about to attack. And then they watched, waited and drank.
He recalls: “Gonzo means ‘hinge’ in Portuguese. I guess to be gonzo is to be unhinged. We went there to discover the evil in the Kentucky Derby, but at the end of it we looked in the mirror and there we saw the evil face looking back: we were the evil.”
Steadman’s “melted” Polaroid prints – of Myra Hindley, Ronald Reagan, Princess Diana – have become an indelible part of these characters’ iconography. As for the present he’s all but given up drawing politicians; he’s about to publish a book of drawings of endangered birds.
“I look at Cameron and Osborne and call them balloon faces. These are amateurs now.”
Steadman’s generation believed satire, activism and moral outrage could change the world. Seeing his drawings of famine victims on the walls of the gallery barely does justice to their impact when carried via newsprint, into hundreds of thousands of homes, in the midst of the events they report on.
He says: “I wanted to change the world. I think I’ve succeeded now because it’s worse now than when it started.”
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