Tomi Ungerer: Children’s Books and Adult Desire

Jean-Thomas “Tomi” Ungerer was a French artist and writer from Alsace, born 28 November 1931 and dead 9 February 2019. The career runs from children’s picture books people loved, to sharp political posters, to explicit erotic art for adult and fetish readers, including work with a bondage charge. That range cost him the American children’s-book market. It later got him recognition at the Sexual Freedom Awards. He published more than 140 books: the fantastic, autobiography, social satire, and sex. On a BDSM map he matters because the same hand could draw Moon Man and could draw adult desire without an apology.

The childhood is part of the line. He was born in Strasbourg, youngest of four children of Alice (Essler) and Theo Ungerer. His father, an artist, engineer, and maker of astronomical clocks, died in 1936. The family then moved to Logelbach, near Colmar. Ungerer lived through the German occupation of Alsace. The Wehrmacht requisitioned the house. Border trauma, a household that drew as a technical practice, and the graphic wit of American magazines, especially The New Yorker and Saul Steinberg, sit under a career that did not stay polite.

In 1956 he moved to the United States. The next year Harper & Row published his first children’s books, The Mellops Go Flying and The Mellops Go Diving for Treasure. By the early 1960s he had made at least ten picture books for Harper and had illustrated other writers. He also drew for The New York Times, Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, and television, and he made posters against the Vietnam War. Maurice Sendak called Moon Man (1966) one of the best picture books of recent years. After Allumette: A Fable (1974), whose subtitle nods to Andersen, the Grimms, and Ambrose Bierce, he mostly left children’s literature for adult work. He came back to children’s books in 1998 with Flix. Manuscripts and art for the early children’s books are in the Children’s Literature Research Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia. In 1998 the International Board on Books for Young People gave him the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for illustration, the top honor in that field.

From the mid-1970s he put his energy into adult books and drawings whose subject was sex. That was a second public identity, not a side hobby. American librarians and parents often refused to file that work next to the Mellops. Erotic portfolios and satirical sex drawings, sometimes involving restraint, power games, and bodies drawn without sentiment, passed among collectors. What they wanted was the other Ungerer: the ink aggression of the anti-war posters, aimed at desire. Institutions that had praised the picture-book talent often pulled back. That break is part of the story retold in the documentary Far Out Isn’t Far Enough. He called himself a storyteller and a satirist first. Erotic work sat beside political satire and children’s fantasy as a third subject, not a shameful footnote. Themes of animal cruelty and war had already trained the line to handle cruelty and absurdity. Sex was another human absurdity to file. In 2014 the Sexual Freedom Awards gave him Lifetime Achievement of the Year. With that award, the sexual-freedom world called the adult work cultural speech.

Tolerance and the building of Europe run through the public work: Franco-German reconciliation in Alsace, diversity treated as a value. In 2003 the Council of Europe named him Ambassador for Childhood and Education. In 2007 Strasbourg opened the Musée Tomi Ungerer / Centre international de l’illustration for him. He and his wife moved to Ireland in 1976, and he split time between Ireland and Strasbourg. Besides graphic art he designed, collected toys, and called himself an archivist of human absurdity. Design work includes the poster for Dr. Strangelove (1964), the logo for the Broadway musical Kelly (1965), art and titles for Monterey Pop (1968), and the Janus Aqueduct in Strasbourg (1988). The 2012 documentary Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story played at Palm Springs in 2013 and put the “children’s-book star / erotic exile” story in front of film audiences. In 2015 and 2016 the Kunsthaus Zürich and Museum Folkwang in Essen gave him large shows, especially the collages, with a Diogenes book of essays. In 2018 he was made a commander of the Legion of Honour. He died in Cork, Ireland, on 9 February 2019, aged 87.

Kink readers keep him because he would not collapse the work into one product. The line was known for social satire and for aphorisms as much as for story picture books. Political satire, eroticism, and imaginative subjects for children run through the career. The adult work did not cancel the Andersen Medal. It is the other half. American rejection of the erotic turn, set against late European honors (the museum, the Legion of Honour, the Council of Europe post), shows how place and decade change what an illustrator is allowed to be. For this site he is the children’s-book name who went into explicit erotic art and bondage-adjacent drawing, kept working, and ended with both the Andersen Medal and a Sexual Freedom lifetime award. The shelf is double. Further reading named around him includes Wilhelm Hornbostel’s Tomi Ungerer. Zwischen Marianne und Germania (Prestel, 1999), Thérèse Willer’s museum catalogue, a Graphis profile, Maria Linsmann’s notes, the essay collection Expect the Unexpected edited by Daniel Keel, and the official and museum sites.