Babylon

"Satire: an area in which the artist, both a cigarette lighter and a flame-thrower, discovers the intoxication of the arsonist," announces Tomi Ungerer.
Continuing the social criticism begun in the United States, in 1979 Tomi Ungerer published a collection of 110 drawings entitled Babylon. In it he goes beyond the relatively straightforward social satire of his American years and attacks the evils of emerging consumerism. These are scathing attacks and we may be taken aback by the violence of the drawings. In the introduction to Babylon, the Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt calls the book's frightening drawings "hieroglyphs of terror." We see Ungerer's anti-militarism and his thoughts on how society has developed, with portraits of women as pushy working girls, a uniformed mother with a Mickey Mouse head or an obese family ... Tomi Ungerer abandons the Indian ink he used for cartoons, instead adopting a grease pencil with thicker and more fluid lines, sometimes hatched. The drawing is free, at times with virtuoso effects using white undrawn areas on the paper. It is not difficult to see a filiation with the committed work of Daumier, an emblematic figure of 19th century caricature.