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Tomi Ungerer was great. I reviewed “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi
Ungerer Story” in 2013.
(https://louisproyect.org/2013/06/15/three-films-of-note-4/) The film
can be seen on Amazon Prime.
---
NY Times, Feb. 12, 2019
Tomi Ungerer, Brash Illustrator for Young and Older, Dies at 87
By Neil Genzlinger
Tomi Ungerer, an acclaimed illustrator and author who brought a scampish
style to children’s books and whose wide-ranging career also took him
into advertising, protest art and erotica, died on Friday in Cork,
Ireland. He was 87.
His death was announced on his website.
Mr. Ungerer burst onto the children’s-book scene in 1957 with “The
Mellops Go Flying,” the first of a series of books he would write and
illustrate about a family of pigs prone to going on adventures and
getting into predicaments. (In the first book, they build an airplane,
which crashes when it runs out of fuel, and that’s only the beginning of
the tale.)
The Mellops books and others, with their quirky stories and simple but
idiosyncratic drawings, stood out in the often uninspiring world of
children’s books. Yet Mr. Ungerer, born in Europe but living in the
United States, was soon also turning his artistic talents to more adult
themes, in works like “The Underground Sketchbook of Tomi Ungerer”
(1964), which was full of humorous, suggestive drawings.
As the Vietnam War became the dominant political issue of the day, he
made posters with an antiwar theme; one, from 1967, showed the Statue of
Liberty being crammed down the throat of a yellow figure. And,
especially after the publication in 1969 of his “Fornicon,” a book of
comical but startling sexual imagery, he found himself unwelcome in
children’s-book circles.
“Americans cannot accept that a children’s-book author should do erotic
work or erotic satire,” he told The New York Times in 2008, when some of
his children’s books began to be republished in the United States and
Britain. “Even in New York it just wasn’t acceptable.”
In the last decade, though, his status as an important and innovative
figure in graphic arts has been more widely recognized in the United
States. In 2015 he had his first American retrospective, at the Drawing
Center in New York.
“This selection is too small and fast-moving to do justice to Mr.
Ungerer’s multifaceted creativity,” Roberta Smith wrote in reviewing
that show in The Times. “With a talent as polymorphous as this, you want
a cornucopia, not a tasting menu.”
In many facets of his career, Mr. Ungerer was influenced by the daunting
circumstances of his youth in the World War II era. He was born
Jean-Thomas Ungerer on Nov. 28, 1931, in Strasbourg, in the Alsace
region of France, on the German border. His father, Théodore, who was a
co-owner of a factory that produced astronomical clocks, died when he
was 3, and he was raised by his mother, Alice (Essler) Ungerer.
It was a place and time of tension, the area being half German, half
French; part Protestant (as was his household), part Catholic; and
troubled by class divisions.
“I was brought up and educated with hate,” Mr. Ungerer said in an
interview that appeared just last week in The Comics Journal. “Hatred of
the neighbors, hatred of the Germans, hatred of the Catholics. It was
nothing but hate, hate, hate.”
During the Vietnam War, Mr. Ungerer made posters, like this one from
1967, with an antiwar theme.CreditTomi Ungerer/Diogenes Verlag AG
Within a few years came a whole different level of hate as the Nazis
overran the region. They tried to indoctrinate the region’s youths,
forcing them to speak German.
“It was total, systematic brainwashing every day,” Mr. Ungerer said.
Drawing was among the coping mechanisms that got him through the war
years. But the return of French control when World War II ended in 1945
brought its own problems: Some viewed the people in his region as Nazi
sympathizers or collaborators. Again, Mr. Ungerer had a sense of not
belonging, on which he would later draw in his children’s books.
“I know how it feels to be different,” he said in an interview last year
with Print magazine, “and I must say that all the children’s books I did
after that were all actually ostracized animals. I did one about the
rats, about a chauve-souris — a bat — about a vulture.” One of his
best-loved children’s books, “Crictor” (1958), had a boa constrictor as
the main character.
Mr. Ungerer joined the French Camel Corps in 1952 but was discharged the
next year because of illness. He then attended the Municipal School of
Decorative Arts in Strasbourg for a year, after which he spent time
traveling around Europe. In 1956, with $60 in his pocket, he went to New
York and began shopping his services as an illustrator. He also peddled
his children’s-book ideas.
“The children’s books in those days where ghastly,” he told Print — tame
and unimaginative. He went to see the biggest publisher in the field,
Golden Books, where an editor was uninterested in his ideas but also honest.
“He said, ‘Listen, what you are showing me here is not publishable in
America,’ ” Mr. Ungerer said. “ ‘There’s only one person who would
publish you, and that is Ursula Nordstrom at Harper.’ ”
He sought her out, and she did indeed publish him — and, later, his
friends Shel Silverstein and Maurice Sendak.
“Tomi influenced everybody,” Mr. Sendak told The Times in 2008.
Mr. Ungerer also created illustrations for advertisements, including, in
the early and middle 1960s, a series of posters for The Times. And when
he sought to make a trip to China, he came to the attention of the
authorities. He often told the story of being snatched by three shadowy
men as he walked through Idlewild Airport in Queens in 1960 and being
whisked away for an interrogation.
“I had to undress, even open up the soles of my shoes because they were
looking for hidden messages or something,” he said.
Not much came of the incident, but his antiwar posters and erotica gave
him a notoriety that cost him work and, in 1970, led him to move to
Canada. In 1976 he relocated to Ireland.
His forays into erotica made him an outcast in some places, but
Continental Europe continued to embrace him. (“That’s just an
Anglo-Saxon problem, in England and America,” he told Artspace in 2015.)
In 1981, a retrospective of his work was exhibited in Paris, Munich,
Dublin and London, among other places. In 2007, Strasbourg even opened a
museum dedicated to him.
Mr. Ungerer, who had been married previously to Nancy White and Miriam
Strandquest, married Yvonne Wright in 1971. She survives him, as do two
daughters, Phoebe and Aria; two sons, Pascal and Lukas; a sister,
Vivette; and two grandchildren.
In addition to his children’s books, Mr. Ungerer wrote autobiographical
works, including “Tomi: A Childhood Under the Nazis” (published in
English in 1991) and “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough” (1983), a memoir whose
title was also used for a 2012 documentary about him by Brad Bernstein.
Another book was a compilation of interviews he did with dominatrixes at
a bordello in Hamburg. (The title, roughly translated, is “Guardian
Angels of Hell.”) In the 2008 interview with The Times, he described its
subjects.
“Fine women,” he said. “Fine ladies. They do the job where the
psychiatrists stop, you know?”
Mr. Ungerer spoke and wrote in English, German and French. For the
children’s books, though, he said he would always write first in English.
“It’s because for every one word in French there are 10 words in
English,” he told Publishers Weekly in 2011. “There are so many
synonyms, so many shades of meaning. I like to call things what they
are. I never say ‘a tree’; I say ‘a willow.’ ”
That precision underscored his philosophy when writing for young readers.
“We have to take children seriously,” he said.
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