The family lived privately yet mixed with local people, many of whom knew little of the prodigious output of the artist farmer in their midst. In 1976, the couple moved again – this time to west Cork where they raised their three children, Aria, Pascal and Lukas, in a remote farmhouse on the Mizen peninsula. The controversy led to Ungerer being effectively blacklisted in the United States and in 1971, he and his third wife, Yvonne Wright, moved to a farm in Nova Scotia, Canada. However, it was his erotic drawings, particularly those in Fornicon, that he published in 1969, that caused uproar.

Books for adults included The Underground Sketchbook of Tomi Ungerer” (1964), which was full of humorous, suggestive drawings. He was still writing children’s fiction when he began designing political posters that protested against racial segregation and the Vietnam War, one of which showed the Statue of Liberty being crammed down the throat of a yellow figure. He devised a slogan for the New York State Lottery, “Expect the Unexpected” that echoed a saying by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and was later used by the American alternative news and cultural publication, the Village Voice. In the 1960s, his work in advertising reached wider audiences. He also did the illustrations for Jeff Brown’s 1964 classic children’s book, Flat Stanley. Initially, Ungerer was best-known for his illustrated children’s books, particularly his quirky series about a family of pigs, The Mellops. He mixed in artistic circles with writers Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth and composer Philip Glass and others. In New York, he found work easily as an illustrator for the New York Times, Life and Harper’s Bazaar, while creating posters for movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964). In 1955, He moved to New York with two trunks full of drawings and manuscripts. He then attended the Municipal School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg for a year, after which he spent time travelling around Europe. These experiences contributed to Ungerer’s life-long revulsion of conflict and injustice and his desire to deride the darker side of human nature and society through humour and satire.ĭuring the war years, Ungerer said he was forced to join the Hitler Youth and dig trenches for the German army but while there, he filled his notebooks with battlefield scenes.Īfter failing his high school graduation exams, he joined the French camel cavalry regiment in Algeria but was discharged due to illness.

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.

Flat stanley tomi ungerer