Tomi Ungerer: Illustrator and author behind legendary posters and children’s books

Defiantly against the grain, his work ranged from the political to the erotic

The element of protest was never far away in Ungerer’s work (Getty)

Tomi Ungerer, the award-winning French artist and satirist, published more than 140 books in German, French and English, criss-crossing genres.

His oeuvre included anti-Vietnam War posters, darkly comic children’s books, a mischievous rethinking of The Joy of Sex, children’s literature and a 1986 collection titled Guardian Angels of Hell, featuring interviews with sex workers at a Hamburg brothel.

Ungerer was also a sculptor, printmaker, painter, caricaturist and antique toy collector, an ad man for the Ice Capades (travelling ice-skating shows that started in the US in the Forties and died out in the Nineties), and a food editor for Playboy magazine.

In the German city of Karlsruhe, he designed a kindergarten in the shape of a cat, with a whiskered nose, windows for eyes, a door for a mouth and a slide for a tail.

Raised in the Alsace region, Ungerer lived under Nazi occupation and hitchhiked across Europe before moving to New York in 1956. He found work as an illustrator for publications including The New York Times, Life and Harper’s Bazaar, while creating posters for films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

Ungerer's work included posters for films such as Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’

Ungerer became best known for his children’s books, including the illustrations for Jeff Brown’s 1964 classic Flat Stanley, about a boy who is crushed flat by a bulletin board, slips inside envelopes to travel by mail, and restores himself to proper size with the aid of a bicycle pump.

Writing about outcast characters such as Emile the octopus and Crictor the boa constrictor, he received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, one of the highest honours in children’s literature, in 1998.

Among his most celebrated works were 1961’s The Three Robbers, a moody, blue-hued tale of highway bandits who terrorise the countryside, and 1966’s Moon Man, in which the title character falls to Earth, enjoys the flowering landscapes, and is promptly thrown into prison, only to slip through the bars as he grows smaller as part of the lunar cycle.

While writing the children’s books that made him famous, Ungerer began working on erotic art and designing political posters, including pieces protesting against segregation and the Vietnam War. One 1967 image, titled Eat, showed a disembodied hand force-feeding the Statue of Liberty to a yellow-skinned man; another, Choice Not Chance, showed a pilot decorating the nose of his plane with images of crying children.

Ungerer’s social life included poker games with the Cuban representative to the United Nations, and his political views seemed to catch the attention of federal investigators, particularly after he requested and was denied a permit to visit China.

In interviews, he often recalled being picked up by FBI agents and taken in for questioning after returning from a trip to France in 1960. He said they later tapped his phone and opened his post.

Ungerer at a preview of an exhibition of his work in Schwaebisch Hall, Germany, 2010 (Getty)

For the most part, however, his political work was eclipsed by his erotic drawings, particularly those in Fornicon, a self-published 1969 book, described as “a nightmare vision of mechanised pleasure”.

Ungerer once attended a conference where angry librarians asked him why an illustrator of children’s books would also depict graphic sex acts.

He was then effectively blacklisted in the United States, with many of his books removed from libraries and lost to American readers until about a decade ago, when Phaidon Press began reissuing his work. In Europe, his popularity soared; he sold millions of books in Germany and France. In 2007, a museum dedicated to his life and work opened in Strasbourg, France. The Council of Europe named him ambassador for childhood and education that same year.

He believed adults should accord children great respect.

“They understand the world, in their way. They understand adult language,” he said. “There should not be a limit of vocabulary. In The Three Robbers I don’t use the word ‘gun’. I say ‘blunderbuss’. My goodness, isn’t it more poetic?”

The youngest of four children, Jean-Thomas Ungerer was born in Strasbourg in 1931. His father was an artist, engineer and designer of astronomical clocks who died when Tomi was three; his mother moved the family to Logelbach, near the Alsatian city of Colmar. During the war years, he said he was forced to join the Hitler Youth and dig trenches for the German army, and he filled his notebooks with battlefield scenes.

Ungerer failed his high school graduation exams – his headmaster was said to have described him in a school report as a “willfully perverse and subversive individualist” – and subsequently travelled to northern Finland. He served with the French camel cavalry in Algeria and slowly made his way to New York, with $60 in his pocket and a “trunk full of drawings and manuscripts”.

A meeting with editor Ursula Nordstrom, of what was then Harper & Brothers, led to his first children’s book, 1957’s The Mellops Go Flying, about a family of acrobatic French pigs. The book became a hit and spawned several sequels.

Ungerer moved to Nova Scotia after his spat with the librarians and in 1976 settled in Ireland, where he died. His later books included 1985’s The Joy of Frogs, a comic sex manual for amphibians, and children’s tales such as 1999’s Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear, about a stuffed bear in 1930s Germany.

His first two marriages ended in divorce, and in 1971 he married Yvonne Wright. In addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter from an earlier marriage to Miriam Lancaster; three children from his third marriage; a sister; and two grandchildren.

Ungerer was the subject of a 2012 documentary Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, which took its title from a 1983 illustrated memoir about his years in Canada. The title, he said, referred to an artistic imperative to push ever further into the unknown.

“That’s what’s really fantastic about death, that’s why death has to be welcomed,” he once said. “And when I die, I’ll find out what’s behind the far out. Maybe there’s nothing, but nothing is fantastic, too. Because if you’re faced with nothing, you can fill it up with your mind.”

Jean-Thomas ‘Tomi’ Ungerer, artist and writer, born 28 November 1931, died 9 February 2019

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