This extravagantly designed, exclusive art volume presents approx. 330 illustrations, paintings and collages, many of them previously unpublished. 

Angry and ironic, tender and wonderful: Tomi Ungerer’s America in pictures and texts.

When Tomi Ungerer moved from the Alsace to New York in the mid-1950s and began to work as a graphic designer and illustrator, a crazy new world opened itself up to him, which the talented artist transformed into what are perhaps the most remarkable and powerful works of his career. Expressive and universal pictures which present the land of opportunities in a unique manner.

Tomi Ungerer's thirty melancholic as well as poetic images about the slow death of a fishing village formerly hardly touched by civilization and situated at the end of the world: Lockport in Nova Scotia. An art book which is at the same time a touching illustration and extension of Tomi Ungerer's autobiographic report »Here Today, Gone Tomorrow«.

»For 'normal' human beings a torture chamber is hell. However, for other people the normal, everyday world is hell and the torture chamber is a cell of refuge, isolated from the outer world by a protective dominatrix – a guardian angel from hell. In this work, I am concerned with a question which I have asked myself again and again throughout my life: what is normal?«

The book to end all books – the last book of the 20th century. »Pictures like atomic waste, caricatures of a world which caricatures itself, caricatures multiplied, squared, cubed. Hieroglyphs of horror: ›And look, oh look! On the white wall, a human hand; it wrote and wrote on the white wall, in letters of fire; it wrote and disappeared.‹ It is what the prophet Daniel told the King of Babylon, about his future, that Tomi Ungerer is telling us: about our future. It is there in these pages. It is up to you, reader and art-lover, to summon up the courage to look at them. You, too, are a contemporary. I know it is not easy. Perhaps you will become an art-hater. It will not matter. Nowadays art has too many false lovers anyway. But the time when things stop being merely amusing is not time lost. It could be that in these times we begin to realise that reflection is an activity which we earthly contemporaries of ourselves and other rats need desperately.« Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Preface)

Tomi Ungerer's inexorable ascent began in the fifties in New York - with commercial artwork. Since then a central element has reccurred in his multi-layered work: Tomi Ungerer, the drawer, painter, illustrator, narrative writer, author of children's books, has created hundreds of posters. This book shows a cross-section thereof: the beginnings in America, advertising work and deadly serious social criticism, posters for music and the theatre, for Strasbourg and the Alsace, for humanitarian campaigns and organisations - and posters for children over and over again.

Tomi Ungerer’s famous and infamous graphic masterpiece.

A visual satirical critique of society.

Tomi Ungerer is at the apex of his graphic art in these pages. His deceptively simple sketches, some of them done only in black ink, are an abyss of human desires. Satirically exaggerated to the point of agony, full of vicious wit and absurd ideas, they hit the reader hard with their intelligence and clear-sightedness.

At the age of four, Tomi Ungerer loses his father Theo, maker of the clock at Strasburg Cathedral and multi-talented artist. Decades later, Tomi begins his search for this enigmatic father. He follows the Ungerers' long tradition of clockmaking back to his great-grandparents, and in the correspondence between his own parents, stumbles upon the traces of a passionate love story which is to become the central theme of the book. Above all, he discovers in his father a sensitive and multi-faceted artist, whose work is so similar to his own that it seems as if the father's genius has been directly passed on to the son. Beautifully illustrated with works by father and son, this book is nothing short of a family photo album, and reads like an art book, a pictorial journey into an everlasting Alsace – a work of subtlety, shaped by the childhood memories of the search for a father. This meeting between Tomi-the-son and Theo-the father, which explores the mysterious roots of artistic creation, sheds new light on the art of Tomi Ungerer – art which, in its most glorious elements, draws perpetual inspiration from the lost paradise of childhood.