| TOMI UNGERER, Ireland / France Cartoonist and autor |
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| "Art critics are specialists, Those have norms, Those take part. I’m a destroyer, I blow against the wind.” Tomi Ungerer Hailed as a Renaissance artist and global cartoonist, boasting some 40,000 drawings and over 140 books, Tomi Ungerer can look back on a stupendous career – and look forward to more. |
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His talent showed early, as did his fierce desire for independence. An irritated school teacher recognised in him "an intended originality, perverse and subversive." Tomi left school to roam throughout Europe, hopping on cargo trains and hiking from Greece to Iceland. Exploring, watching, listening, sniffing, tasting, touching, stocking the granaries of his mind with exciting sounds and scents, lines and shapes, colours and proportions, emotions and stories, eventually he began to draw and to develop his own universe. Tomi Ungerer has confessed that at times he feels like a tree in a state of eternal autumn, the leaves dropping to the ground. Yet his work suggests quite the opposite: a tree in springtime brimming with the sap of exuberance, branching out in all directions at once, bursting its buds to unfold a thousand tender leaves. |
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Armed with a prodigious sense of subtle allusion, paradox and crafty satire, Ungerer has left his griffe, his scratch, on the bark of oblivion, everywhere. The American Biographical Institute ranks him as one of the "500 World Leaders of Influence”; France has named him Officier de la Légion d’Honneur; and film director Percy Aldon exults, "I never met anyone else whose creativity is as comprehensive, as vital, as exciting.” Quite a different portrait from that of the irritated school teacher. |
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