TOMI UNGERER, BRASH ILLUSTRATOR FOR YOUNG AND OLDER, DIES AT 87

The illustrator and author Tomi Ungerer in 2011. His wide-ranging career encompassed children’s books, advertising, protest art and erotica.CreditCreditChristopher Capozziello for The New York Times

By Neil Genzlinger

Tomi Ungerer, an acclaimed illustrator and author who brought a scampish style to children’s books and whose wide-ranging career also took him into advertising, protest art and erotica, died on Friday in Cork, Ireland. He was 87.

His death was announced on his website.

Mr. Ungerer burst onto the children’s-book scene in 1957 with “The Mellops Go Flying,” the first of a series of books he would write and illustrate about a family of pigs prone to going on adventures and getting into predicaments. (In the first book, they build an airplane, which crashes when it runs out of fuel, and that’s only the beginning of the tale.)

The Mellops books and others, with their quirky stories and simple but idiosyncratic drawings, stood out in the often uninspiring world of children’s books. Yet Mr. Ungerer, born in Europe but living in the United States, was soon also turning his artistic talents to more adult themes, in works like “The Underground Sketchbook of Tomi Ungerer” (1964), which was full of humorous, suggestive drawings.

As the Vietnam War became the dominant political issue of the day, he made posters with an antiwar theme; one, from 1967, showed the Statue of Liberty being crammed down the throat of a yellow figure. And, especially after the publication in 1969 of his “Fornicon,” a book of comical but startling sexual imagery, he found himself unwelcome in children’s-book circles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/obituaries/tomi-ungerer-dead.html