and peripatetic wanderer allowed him to see through the artifice of
American politics and society, and underscored his vision.
Born in Strasbourg, Alsace, Ungerer grew up under French rule
and German occupation. “It gave me my first lesson in relativity and
cynicism—prison camps, propaganda, bombings... all to culminate in an
apotheosis of warfare. My taste for the macabre certainly finds its roots
here,” he explained. Ungerer lacked any formal art training but found solace
in his art. Before embarking on a career, though, he joined the camel corps
of the French Army in Africa, from which he was discharged for ill health.
At the age of twenty-four, however, he came to the United States to be a
freelance illustrator. He ultimately produced various children’s books for
Harper and Row. His most significant,Crictor, published in 1957 , was the
first children’s book to feature a boa constrictor (then taboo) as its main
character.
During the 1950 s, Ungerer did not have outlets for his personal
work, so he filled many sketchbooks with surreal cartoons. His Underground
Sketchbook, which took him many years to get published, was a repository
for biting comic commentaries about sex, war, death, and love. He
eventually turned his attention from the general human condition to
realpolitik. He rejected any semblance of idealism, especially in terms of
war: “Some wars are necessary evils,” he once wrote, “but Vietnam was
stupid.” His drawings and self-published posters were savage indictments of
that war’s brutality. There is the feeling in looking at sketches and posters
showing soldiers brutally forcing Vietnamese to metaphorically swallow the
American way of life, that everyone was had by the lies and duplicity of
government and its leaders. “Because America is a gutless country,” he
argued. “I do a political drawing because of a need I have. Out of anger.”
But posters with the conceptual intensity of Black Power/White Power, born
of pure emotion, ultimately became historical essays on the mechanisms of
life. “I am not really an artist, I am a thinker. I just use my drawings as a
tool to make my thoughts accessible.”
An artist this mercurial might be expected to have a limited cult
following, but to his surprise Ungerer became the wunderkind of American
editorial and advertising art. He was given hundreds of commissions,
notably a series of billboards for the New York State Lottery with the
headline “Expect the Unexpected,” showing absurd and ironic vignettes as
only Ungerer could make them. This headline and Ungerer’s ideas were
eventually adopted by the Village Voice,New York’s leading alternative
newspaper, for its own advertising campaign. But the methods of the
commercial world eventually soured Ungerer, and in 1970 he severed his
relations. “My intention was to get away from Madison Avenue and its
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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