Fables for Adults
Even as Ungerer was busy authoring books for children, he was hard at work on what Thérèse Willer, curator of the Musée Tomi Ungerer in Strasbourg, has referred to as “fables for adults,” books of satirical drawings that address social ills and foibles. The drawings assembled here come from Der Herzinfarkt (Heart attack) and The Underground Sketchbook, published in 1962 and 1964, respectively, and The Party, Ungerer’s self-published take-down of New York elite society, a world into which the artist’s growing reputation had secured him introduction. Der Herzinfarkt takes on the American business world, while The Underground Sketchbook addresses more insidious evils, like the brutality of war and mechanized violence. In both cases, Ungerer was deeply influenced by Saul Steinberg, whose work he first discovered at the American Cultural Institute in Strasbourg. In Ungerer’s words, “Saul Steinberg taught me how to rationalize, how to distill an idea, to turn it, thanks to a maximum economy of the gesture, to express the essential.”1 Two decades later, he would employ this technique to devastating effect in the brutal images from his meditation on death, Rigor Mortis. Meanwhile, in The Party, published in 1966, we meet such outrageous characters as Mrs. Julia Van Flooze and Major Lewis Rumpstick, each executed in unforgiving black ink against empty white grounds. Distorted by animal appendages and mechanical limbs, The Party’s “beautiful set” is a parade of monsters.
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Ungerer quoted in Tomi Ungerer et ses maîtres: Inspirations et dialogues (Strasbourg: Éditions des Musées de Strasbourg, 2011), 29. Translation by Claire Gilman.