Tomi Ungerer Evergreen Review Poster, 1967

Vintage original Tomi Ungerer, Vietnam protest poster for Evergreen Review, 1967:

Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset began Evergreen review in 1957 as a literary quarterly featuring the likes of Sartre, Camus and Beckett as well as American poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac. Here, a poster for the February 1967, number utilizes cover artwork by noted illustrator and satirist Tomi Ungerer: a coolie-hatted image of Uncle Sam, sunk in the quagmire of Vietnam and displeased with the face he presents to the mirror.

Medium: Off-set lithograph.
Dimensions: 30 x 45 inches.
Some signs of minor handling; otherwise very good condition.
Original 1st printing.

Tomi Ungerer was a French author and illustrator known for both his children’s book drawings and his witty, profane adult illustrations. He was the subject of the 2013 documentary, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, in which the illustrator and author Maurice Sendak describes him as having, “his pulse on something which was extraordinary. It was disarming and funny. And not respectable at all.” He was born on November 28, 1931, in Strasbourg, France and in 1956, he moved to New York where he published his first children’s book, The Mellops Go Flying (1957). There, he also began working for publications that included Life and the New York Times. During the early 1970s, he suffered under new Supreme Court guidelines on obscenity which rendered him effectively blacklisted for his erotic works. Nevertheless, in 1998 he was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen medal for his lasting contribution to children’s literature, and in 2007 the Tomi Ungerer Museum opened in Strasbourg. The rejection of his work prompted him to move to a remote part of Nova Scotia, Canada in 1971 with his wife Yvonne. In 1976, they moved to Ireland. Ungerer died on February 9, 2019 in Cork, Ireland at the age of 87.