No Books for Children. Enfantillages chapter 2

From 22 November 2024 to 2 March 2025, the Tomi Ungerer Museum – International Centre for Illustration, is presenting chapter 2 of the exhibition “No Books for Children” which takes up the chronological thread where the exhibition presented in the Rohan Palace (Galerie Heitz) ends, in other words with Tomi Ungerer and the creation of the Illustration Workshop in Strasbourg in 1972.
François Ruy-Vidal, a major publisher of French children’s literature at that time, formulated four main principles for his programme: "There is no art for children, there is art. There is no graphic design for children, there is graphic design. There are no colours for children, there are colours. There is no literature for children, there is literature. Based on these four principles, it could be said that a children's book is a good book when it is a good book for everyone." This founding principle is indicative of a major development in the design and creation of books, an evolution that began in the second half of the 20th century and continues to this day.

This essential issue - "There is no literature for children" - serves as a common thread and title for the exhibition: it is about making illustration an art form in its own right, and using the same criteria of artistic and literary quality for children's literature as for literature in general.

The exhibition takes the work of Tomi Ungerer as its starting point and examines how the boundaries between different literary genres were abolished from the moment when children began to be taken seriously, were confronted with difficult themes and, above all, could construct the meaning of the work for themselves. It thus goes beyond the issue of literature by posing the eminently social and political question of how children's imagination is constructed.

Ungerer's work is driven by a faith in the poetic dimension of literature and image, in other words, a plurality of meaning. His political commitment, his satirical critique of society, his call for essential values such as friendship, courage and respect for difference are not cast in didactic or moralizing terms. Thanks to the autonomy of text and image as a form of artistic expression, adults are able to read into the work other things than children and, in the same way, children do not necessarily see what the voice reads - and dictates - to them.

On the first floor, the exhibition highlights recognized or emerging contemporary illustrators who are interested in the place of the child in poetic, political and playful forms - because there is probably nothing more politically important for the construction of our future than the question of children's imagination. There are therefore adventure books that explore perception, books written with children, books in which the authority relationships between children and adults are reversed, books in which the emotional life of the child can find resonance.

The international and Strasbourg-based illustration artists exhibited include:

Beatrice Alemagna, Pauline Barzilaï, Blexbolex, Serge Bloch, Lisa Blumen, Mathilde Chèvre, Guillaume Chauchat, Kitty Crowther, Dominique Goblet, Marie Mirgaine, Saehan Parc, Matthias Picard, Mathieu Sapin, Leo Timmers

Curator: Anna Sailer, curator of the Tomi Ungerer Museum – International Illustration Centre.
Advisory committee: Britta Benert, Loïc Boyer.
Installations: Cécile Tonizzo.

This exhibition benefits from the exceptional support of the Eurométropole of Strasbourg