Tomi Ungerer, 87; artist, writer

Tomi Ungerer, an award-winning artist and trilingual writer who leaped between genres and mediums, crafting works that included anti-Vietnam War posters, darkly comic children’s books, a mischievous rethinking of “The Joy of Sex” and a cat-shaped kindergarten building in Germany, died last week at his daughter’s home in Cork, Ireland. He was 87.

His daughter Aria Ungerer confirmed the death and said the precise date and cause were not known.

“He was in absolutely brilliant form in the past few days,” she said, and was writing a collection of short stories “about his alter ego, Mr. Malparti.”

Working primarily as a satirist, Ungerer published more than 140 books in German, French and English, including works of children’s literature and a 1986 collection titled “Guardian Angels of Hell,” featuring interviews with sex workers at a Hamburg bordello. He was also a sculptor, printmaker, painter, caricaturist and antique toy collector, an ad man for the Ice Capades and a food editor for Playboy magazine.

For the New York State Lottery in the late 1960s, he devised a slogan, “Expect the Unexpected,” that echoed a saying by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and was later used by the Village Voice; for the German city of Karlsruhe, four decades later, he designed a kindergarten in the shape of a cat, with a whiskered nose, windows for eyes, a door for a mouth and a slide for a tail.

“No one, I dare say, no one was as original,” his friend Maurice Sendak, author of “Where the Wild Things Are,” told The New York Times in 2008. “Tomi influenced everybody.”

Raised in the Alsace region of France, Ungerer lived under Nazi occupation and hitchhiked across Europe before moving to New York in 1956. He found work as an illustrator for publications including The New York Times, Life and Harper’s Bazaar, while creating posters for movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and briefly sharing an apartment with novelist Philip Roth.

But he became best known for his children’s books, including the illustrations for Jeff Brown’s 1964 classic “Flat Stanley,” about a boy who is crushed flat by a bulletin board, slips inside envelopes to travel by mail, and restores himself to proper size with the aid of a bicycle pump.

Writing about outcast characters such as Emile the octopus and Crictor the boa constrictor, he received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, one of the highest honors in children’s literature, in 1998.