Steadman @ 77

To celebrate Ralph Steadman’s multifarious career (and his 77th birthday) the Cartoon Museum mounted a major retrospective of his work over the last 50 years. It featured over 100 original artworks. The exhibition explored the full range of the artist’s work, including his earliest published cartoon from 1956, material from Private Eye, Punch, the Observer, the New Statesman and Rolling Stone, as well as his illustrated books, Sigmund Freud, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, I, Leonardo, The Big I Am and Animal Farm. There were atmospheric wine drawings produced for Oddbins catalogues, humanitarian pictures, savage political cartoons and some of his charming and funny illustrations for children’s books. The show also included examples of the extinct birds and imaginary ‘boids’ which he created for his most recent book Extinct Boids (2012). The exhibition was accompanied by a 160-page catalogue in full colour with contributions by Johnny Depp, Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson and Will Self.