Tomi Ungerer

Biography

The first language Tomi Ungerer was taught at school was German, and an eight-year-old had about three months to learn it. At home he spoke French and Alsatian. In class his first name was replaced with “Hans”.

He was born on 28 November 1931 in Strasbourg, the youngest of four children. His father, Théodore Ungerer, was an engineer, an artist and a maker of astronomical clocks; he died in 1936. The family moved to Logelbach, near Colmar. After the defeat of France in 1940 Alsace was annexed by Germany, and the family house and factory were requisitioned. His mother kept speaking French to her son despite the ban, and when she was denounced she explained to an official that after the German victory people would be needed to govern the French; by this account, she was believed. Ungerer later recalled it as French at home, Alsatian in the street, German at school. He began to draw in those years, as if to shut out everyday life. After the liberation came a new trouble: at school he was now punished for speaking Alsatian. Later he spoke of the “cultural murder” of the region. He described these years in the autobiographical book “Tomi: A Childhood Under the Nazis” (1998).

After school he cycled around France, then made his way by whatever means he could to Lapland and the North Cape; he failed the baccalauréat in 1951. In 1952 he joined the camel corps (méharistes) of the French army in Algeria, and in 1953 he was discharged. At the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg he was expelled after a year for indiscipline. He worked as a window dresser and an advertising artist, and in 1954–1955 he travelled through Iceland, Norway, Greece and Yugoslavia, hitchhiking or working as a sailor on cargo ships.

In 1956 Ungerer sailed to New York with sixty dollars and a trunk of drawings and manuscripts. In 1957 he settled there for good.

He was inspired by The New Yorker, above all by Saul Steinberg. In 1957 the publisher Harper & Row brought out his first children’s book, “The Mellops Go Flying”, and its editor Ursula Nordstrom became the decisive figure for him in children’s literature. By the early 1960s he had made at least ten picture books, among them “The Three Robbers” (1961) and “Moon Man” (1966), which Maurice Sendak called one of the best picture books in recent years. He also illustrated other people’s texts, for example “Flat Stanley” by Jeff Brown (1964). He drew for The New York Times, Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar and The Village Voice, designed the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), and later the poster and titles for the film “Monterey Pop” (1968).

He also became known for political posters against the Vietnam War and racial segregation, among them “Black Power/White Power” (1967). He published books for adults with erotic and satirical drawings as well. Such work made it hard to publish in the United States, and around 1970 Ungerer and his wife moved to Nova Scotia in Canada, which is the subject of the book “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough” (1983). In 1976 the family settled in County Cork in Ireland.

After “Allumette” (1974) he stopped writing for children for a long time and turned to books for adults, many of them about sexuality. He returned to children’s literature in 1998 with “Flix”. That same year he received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for illustration.

From 1975 he gave his native city drawings and toys from his collection. Today the museum holds about 14,000 drawings and 1,500 toys. In the 1980s he worked a great deal on Franco-German reconciliation and on preserving bilingualism in Alsace. For the bimillennium of Strasbourg, in 1988, he made the Janus fountain (“The Birth of Civilisation”) beside the opera house. The Tomi Ungerer Museum opened in Strasbourg in November 2007. In 2015–2016 the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Museum Folkwang in Essen held a large exhibition of his work, including his collages.

He received the Legion of Honour (chevalier in 1990, commander in 2017; by other accounts, in 2018), and in 2003 he became the Council of Europe’s Ambassador for Childhood and Education. He died on 9 February 2019 in Cork. A farewell service was held in Strasbourg Cathedral on 15 February; half of his ashes lie in the Saint-Gall cemetery in Strasbourg, and half were scattered near the village of Goleen in County Cork.