Artwork Title: A childhood drawing depicting Nazi soldiers in Alsace, France

A childhood drawing depicting Nazi soldiers in Alsace, France, 1940

Tomi Ungerer

Lots of proud parents put their kids' artwork up on the refrigerator, but Tomi Ungerer's childhood drawings, saved by his mother, took crayon on paper handiwork to a whole new level by documenting the Nazi invasion of his French home town. As chronicled in new film Far Out Isn't Far Enough, the illustrator would later charm children, skewer war mongers, and indulge his personal fascination with sado-masochistic erotica with equal aplomb. (http://losarciniegas.blogspot.nl/2014/10/the-illustrated-man-tomi-ungerer-takes.html) Mr. Ungerer, frequently described as a virtuoso and a renegade, was born in Strasbourg, in Alsace, the northeastern region of France, in 1931, and now lives mostly in Ireland. He arrived in New York in 1956 with $60, a suitcase of drawings and few illusions. He had endured the death of his adored father when he was barely 4. Then came the Nazi occupation of Alsace, with its special efforts to indoctrinate schoolchildren, during which he began making startlingly sophisticated satirical drawings of the occupiers and their leader. After the liberation, he watched the French echo the Nazis’ oppressions by trying to scrub Alsace clean of Germanness, including burning the German books in centuries-old libraries. Even so, a kind of optimism triumphed: It was as the creator of a string of award-winning children’s books that Mr. Ungerer first made his name in New York, beginning in 1957 with a story about the Mellops, an airplane-building family of pigs. After that, his activities diversified on several fronts, until 1971, when he abruptly relocated to Nova Scotia with his new wife, Yvonne.... (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/arts/design/review-tomi-ungerer-bad-boy-of-art-in-a-reappraisal.html?_r=0)
Uploaded on Apr 22, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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