Artwork Title: Fear of Feelings

Fear of Feelings, 1982

Tomi Ungerer

Fear of Feelings, 1982 (drawing for Symptomatics, published by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zürich). 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 Times, 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....” (Along article continues). ...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. (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/tomi-ungerers-triumphant-return0
10 x 8 in
Uploaded on Apr 21, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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