Tomi Ungerer grew up in Alsace, during World War II, under the Nazi occupation of France. Even as a child he was a resister—a proverbial thorn in the side of the fatted calf. He says that his teachers tried to brainwash him with pro-Führer propaganda, but to no avail.

In an interview last year he said, "I was a Frenchman with my family, a German in school, and an Alsatian with my friends. I drew my own stuff at home, but whenever I was studying I’d do propaganda, that was the first style I picked up, and no one understood how to manipulate graphic symbols better than the Nazis.”

He says he wasn’t a good student; in fact he dropped out of l’Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg after a year. Then he took over as director his own education, studying drawing by copying what he found at hand.

"At first my drawings were terrible, but I have a systematic discipline that allows me to always keep improving. So I started to copy everything I could in order to learn how to draw it, which accumulated by way of knowledge, collecting it to then be able to compare it all and, eventually, use my imagination."

Inspired by drawings he saw in American magazines, notably The New Yorker, his goal was to emigrate to New York, which he did, in 1957. A year later, his first children’s book, The Mellops Go Flying, was published by Harper & Row.

During the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Ungerer moved away from advertising and editorial work to focus his illustrations on responding to racism, fascism and the Vietnam War. Eat (left) is part of this new direction—a series of brutal anti-war posters and other political criticisms. Although coveted today, not everyone was in support of these drawings, even those on the left.

 “I did my Vietnam War posters originally for the peace movement,” said Ungerer in a recent interview with Artspace, “and they were turned down—they thought they were too harsh. So, I printed them out of my own pocket and distributed them on my own through all the poster shops. They went everywhere—you can even see one of them in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.” 

Eat is now available as a limited edition print, exclusively at Artspace.com. The poster is in an edition of 50, priced at $500, with proceeds benefiting The Drawing Center.

Tomi Ungerer: All in One, the artist’s first museum exhibition in the United States, continues through March 22 at The Drawing Center, 35 Mercer Street, New York, NY.

Read Fernanda Cohen’s exclusive DART interview with Tomi Ungerer here.

Tomi Ungerer’s work has been shown internationally including a retrospective exhibition that traveled from the Louvre to Munich, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Dublin, and the Royal Festival Hall in London; as well as solo exhibitions at Itabashi Art Museum in Tokyo, Strasbourg’s Museum of Modern Art, and Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, Germany. The Council of Europe chose Tomi Ungerer as their first Ambassador for Childhood and Education and he has been awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for children’s literature. In 2007 a museum dedicated solely to the artist’s The Drawing Center, in New York City.