Tomi Ungerer’s Triumphant Return
By Robert Sullivan
February 4, 2015
Now that the illustrator Tomi Ungerer is back—and this was the feeling at the opening of the wonderful new exhibition “Tomi Ungerer: All in One,” up through March 22nd at the Drawing Center—it seems worth looking again at how he went away. Ungerer was sent away, really, his books banned, removed from libraries, and not reviewed in, for instance, the _Time_s, after he was deemed too offensive as an artist. It was a break that was not his fault, though he certainly didn’t help matters and still seems to blame himself for it, judging from his remembrances in the documentary “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough,” which came out in limited release in 2013 and is now available to stream. In the documentary, Ungerer remembers the break as having begun at an American Library Association conference in 1969. “You can really pinpoint exactly the moment that my multiple activities came out into the open,” he says. “It all happened in this one evening, at a children’s-book convention, and I had to say a few words.”
To do so, he arrived at the conference in what may have been a costume. It seemed like one, anyway, to some of the librarians in attendance, many of them his fans. He appeared to be dressed as one of the robbers from his book “The Three Robbers,” a typical Ungerer work in that the title characters aren’t deemed to be as bad as maybe a seventeenth-century New England Calvinist might want them to be, and operate in what a textual theorist would refer to as a liminal area, the no man’s lands where good and bad get confused—a reason kids like them. Up until his remarks at the A.L.A. conference, Ungerer had co-existed in several worlds at once, working brilliantly in each. He was doing advertising work for the Ice Capades, the New York State lottery, the Village Voice, and the Times—often providing a certain bawdiness, or at least titillation. Ads for the Electric Circus, an East Village night club, featured men and women plugging appliances into sexually appropriate places.
These ads were drawn in 1969 and the club closed in 1971, within a year of Ungerer’s appearance at the A.L.A. conference; sadly, they are not featured in the show, though a series of now iconic anti-Vietnam War posters that Columbia University had commissioned (and then rejected as too harsh) are. “Eat” features the Statue of Liberty being shoved down a (yellow) man’s throat. Ungerer would later credit the graphic ferocity of his work to having grown up in Nazi-occupied Alsace. “The irony is, this is a style that I got from Hitler,” he says. “My Vietnam posters, I did them all one day in a total state of anger, one after the other.”
Jules Feiffer is interviewed in the documentary, and praises the posters above all. “As brilliant as the kids’ books are, and as brilliant as his other work, when I see them reproduced still I find those political posters from the sixties shocking to look at,” he says. Feiffer remembers a different work atmosphere for artists and writers. “Everybody lived in such separate universes in those years, and there wasn’t an Internet,” he says. “One could go on living two or three different kinds of lives and doing all this different work and get away with it for a long, long time.”
What Ungerer was getting away with was making erotic drawings, and what seemed to irritate people, in particular, were drawings for a book he called “Fornicon,” published in 1969. He was also taking apart and reassembling Barbies, but it’s not clear that the librarians knew about that nor would have known what to say; in 1973, after all, shortly after Ungerer’s appearance at the A.L.A. conference, the association sponsored a petition asking librarians (primarily in Louisiana and Pennsylvania) not to paint diapers on Maurice Sendak’s Mickey, the unclothed hero of “In the Night Kitchen,” or to rip out the page in “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” a book about a donkey (or maybe an ass) that features helpful and courteous police officers who are pigs. Around 1973, fears of pornography convictions were also causing bookstores and libraries to get rid of books, under a new Supreme Court guidelines on obscenity.
As they are, Ungerer’s erotic drawings would probably not make John Singer Sargent blush. But “Fornicon” could be construed as pornographic if you missed the satire: it’s an attack on the mechanization of sex, its de-personalization and commercialization, from an artist whose offices overlooked Times Square before Disney and the Empire State Development Corporation got hold of it. Of course, there is the possibility that when Ungerer arrived, robber-dressed, to speak at that A.L.A. conference, some of the librarians in attendance might have heard about his ultra-raucous behavior at legendary parties in a legendary-party era. But children's librarians especially ought to have been able to see him as a forever teen-ager, always acting up in class, exploding propane containers, putting pebbles in burgers that sent the Sag Harborians to their dentists. The late Sendak ends up as the star of the Ungerer documentary, and he describes his friend’s transgressions as a gift and a curse:
I am a self-taught raving maniac but not as crazy as Tomi. Or as great as Tomi. No. He had his pulse on something which was extraordinary. It was disarming and funny. And not respectable at all. It was very unusual for a children's-book author to be doing so many different things. He just broke down doors, he broke windows. He just made enemies like crazy! But seemed oblivious—who cares? Thus, he was treated badly. He was not reviewed as often as he should have been. He was not held up as an icon, which he was for a whole generation.
When Ungerer stood at the podium on that fateful (in his mind) day, he was suddenly hit with questions that, one has to think, he knew were coming. “And somebody in the audience attacked me,” he recalls. When he recounts this event in the documentary, he is in his studio at his current home, in Western Ireland. He also lives in Strasbourg, where he is interviewed in a room full of sex toys, his personal collection. Strasbourg is home to the Tomi Ungerer Museum, which includes work by Ungerer as well as by his family, renowned clockmakers. You can see this genetic obsession with gadgetry in all his work, children’s books and “Fornicon” alike.
But Ungerer crossed a line at the A.L.A. event, as the crowd pushed him—asking how dare he draw “Fornicon” and children’s books. “They really went after me,” he recounts, seemingly over the moment until he adds, “Really, like a pack of bitches.” What he says happened was—and a librarian who knew others at the event confirms his story—he got angry. “When I really blow up, then I’m blind, really blind—blind with anger,” he says. “Stupidly, I use the word that you certainly shouldn’t use anyway, especially in those days, and I said to defend myself, ‘If people didn’t fuck, you wouldn’t have any children, and without children you would be out of work.’ And that went, of course, very badly, especially with the word F-U-C-K.”
His punishment was to be effectively blacklisted in America, his books taken from libraries, his children’s publishing career in America over. His penance was to leave town. With his third wife, Yvonne—whom he met on the subway as she was on her way to work at the Children’s Book Council—he moved, on a whim, to Nova Scotia, subsistence living that produced a beautiful journal of painting and writing, “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough,” from which the documentary takes its name. The book, set in a beat-up and wild coastal town (the police station had been boarded up), sees in nature and farming all of Ungerer's favorite subjects: blood and gore, sex and, mostly, death. In real life, the exiled couple had children and, as often happens, the rebel-turned-parent proceeded to look for order. “When we decided to have children,” he says, “we just realized that no way you would have children in such an unstable milieu.”
The documentary gives the impression that, even in an orderly milieu, Ungerer as a father is still fear-wracked by his youth under Nazi occupation, which is described in detail in the film and, in the exhibit, evidenced in his drawings under Nazi tutelage. These are the roots of his fear of censorship and state-sponsored brainwashing. He says:
In all my children’s books, there’s an element of fear. I always try to induce some fear in children. Why? It’s very important, because you have to overcome your fear. Just like my book "The Three Robbers," what fascinates me is that no man's land between the good and the bad. You know, a no man's land is not a place where you should kill each other but a place where you can meet, and I think good can learn a lot from the bad, and bad can learn a lot from the good. Why shouldn’t they have a bit of fun with each other? Excuse me, that’s what life is about.
He continued his commercial work in Europe, and he made books about death (“Rigor Mortis”) and a brothel in Hamburg (“Guardian Angels of Hell”), and championed the rights of Hamburg sex workers. He promoted the European Union and illustrated for Reporters with Borders, including a 1992 poster featured in the show. Also featured is a crucified Statue of Liberty, drawn in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Here it is worth noting that the Statue of Liberty was designed by Frédéric Bartholdi, a native of Colmar, where Ungerer lived under the Nazis and then the French, who, after taking back control from the Nazis, burned the German classics—Schiller, Geothe, et al. “When you are faced with this kind of historical contradiction, what is liberation?” Ungerer asks. “What is fascism? What is dictatorial? And this is what I found out as a child very, very early. Everything is just absurd. The war is absurd. People are absurd. The grownups are absurd.”
On the show’s opening night, the Drawing Center was packed with people, mostly in the front room, and his bondage drawings and “Fornicon” pieces are in the back room, where, to not offend, they seemed to take on offense, proving that in America we are still afraid to admit to our kids that we have sex, a fear made more pathetic in that they typically could care less. Fortunately, Ungerer’s large drawings of the Nova Scotia landscape are given big play, each with a caption from Proverbs. And the pages of “Moon Man” are still shocking, in their deep use of blue and black; it is a dark book, literally, that reeks of ingenuity and crafty harmony and charm.
Ungerer was at the Drawing Center opening, too, dressed in black—standing at first, like a tall robber, and then, after somebody wheeled out an office chair, sitting, a glass of wine like a chalice in his hand as he beamed. A few years ago, he returned to New York; the documentary shows him reading to children from his then just-published American reprints, and visiting his old West Village place. Then there were no crowds greeting him. Seeing him hold court at the Drawing Center suggested that he had beaten the anger that inflames him in the film.
He sat against a wall displaying the unexpected high notes of the Drawing Center’s exhibit. The nudes are good but not exceptional, and some of the illustrations suffer from what many illustrations suffer from—a loss of confidence when shifting from the page to the wall. On the other hand, there are seven small illustrations that have never been seen, and are themselves little Ungerer miracles. They are job work, done for a German pharmaceutical company, each depicting aspects of depression. In one, the floor of a room gives way. In another, a man looks despairingly up an endless staircase. In the only titled piece, “Fear of Feelings,” a man cowers at the sight of a small flower. They are phenomenologically correct dissections of an all-consuming sadness, important treasures that he seems to have brought back from a dark place.
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