Ralph Steadman may well be creeping up past the septuagenarian status, but he’ll always be a legend in the cartoon world, and the new retrospective exhibition at London’s Cartoon Museum looks like it’ll be a cool showcase of his work. Entitled STEADman@77, and curated by the museum’s own Anita O’Brien, it brings together some of the graphical artists most iconic creations.
Celebrating both his career and his 77th birthday, the retrospective exhibition opens on the 1st May 2013, running through until the 8th September, making it one of the summer’s must see exhibitions. It will feature more than 100 artworks from the last fifty years ranging from some of his earliest cartoons from 1956, right up to some the extinct birds and imagined boids that he drew for his 2012 book, Extinct Boids, which was released to raise awareness for the incredible loss of bird species and habitat.
While it will be a wide ranging investigation of the artist’s work, his most popular creations from his long creative collaboration with Hunter S. Thompson will inevitably be the highlight of the exhibition. Both Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail are viciously and brilliantly illustrated by Steadman’s own brand of cover and page art, so it’ll be cool to see how they’re displayed by the curator.
Other artworks in the display will include material produced for Private Eye, Punch, the Observer, the New Statesman and Rolling Stone, charting his massive international influence in graphic illustration. His illustrated books, Sigmund Freud, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking‐Glass, I, Leonardo, The Big I Am and Animal Farm will also feature along with drawings for the Oddbins catalogue, political satire cartoons and his illustrations for children’s books.
Entrance to the exhibition comes with the general admission prices for the Cartoon Museum, which are £5.50 for adults, with £4 Concessions, £3 for students and free to under-18s, Art Fund members and Friends of the Cartoon Museum.
To coincide with the exhibition, there will be a 160 page full colour catalogue of Ralph Steadman’s work featuring contributions from Johnny Depp, Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson and Will Self. In the words of Jonny Depp, “Ralph is an icon, his topical, political renderings iconic, his mad jargon a paragon of artistic brilliance.”
