Watch the Children, That Subversive Is Back

[groovedaddy]

IN 1960 Tomi Ungerer was returning from his native France to New York City, his adopted home, when he realized that three men were walking uncomfortably close to him as he was leaving a terminal at the old Idlewild airport in Queens. One ordered him to drop his suitcases. Then the others latched onto him, hustled him into a car and drove him to a nearby building where they questioned him obliquely about his travel and his political affiliations.

“It was just like in a movie,” Mr. Ungerer recalled recently with a quiet laugh. “I don’t know whether it was the F.B.I. or whoever they were. They even opened the soles of my shoes.”

It’s the kind of trench-coat caper that doesn’t generally feature a beloved children’s book author as the abductee. But then, few children’s book authors in those wary cold war years made a habit of playing poker with the Cuban envoy to the United Nations, as Mr. Ungerer did, or applied for a visa to visit China. Or had a side career publishing books of often disturbing erotica. Or held parties in the Hamptons so notorious that the neighbors were afraid to invite him to theirs. Or, as an author willing to feature a boa constrictor as a main character and to leave a bloody foot dangling inexplicably from a hobo’s knapsack, elicited descriptions in children’s book reviews like “brutal,” “nasty” and a “master of the diabolic.”

Mr. Ungerer moved to New York from Strasbourg in 1956 — with only a trunk full of drawings and $60 in his pocket, as articles from those years unfailingly report — and became an almost immediate success. At the dawn of a golden age for magazine illustration, the jazzy, acid-etched work that flowed from his chaotic studio on West 42nd Steet seemed to be everywhere: Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/arts/design/27kenn.html?th&emc=th