By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN


STRASBOURG, France-It seemed a good moment, what with another round of sex scandals making news, to get a European perspective from Tomi Ungerer.

The Alsatian-born former bad boy of the advertising business, best-selling children’s author, longtime Council of Europe goodwill ambassador for children and education, and voluminous illustrator of bondage and other erotica is still going strong after 77 years.

I meant to quiz him about Silvio Berlusconi and Roman Polanski and the French culture minister who, after defending Mr. Polanski, had to go on television to explain why, as he had written in an autobiography, he paid to sleep with young men in Asia.

To prepare, I stopped at Mr. Ungerer’s museum. Since he has produced dozens of books and thousands of drawings and collected a vast assortment of toys, it was natural that he would have a museum. Several dozen elderly French and German visitors were there, perusing pictures of copulating frogs and naked women trussed up like chickens.

Mr. Ungerer splits his time between here and Ireland, where his wife and children occupy a farm. Back in the 1960s he was a wild and crazy fixture on the commercial art scene . He arrived in New York in 1956, as he tells the story, with $60, a trunk full of drawings and the remnants of a disease he had caught while serving with the Camel Corps in Algeria.

Assignments at Sports Illustrated and Esquire magazines and a contract with a publisher for what became “The Mellops Go Flying,” about a family of Gallic pigs, got him started. The book was a hit.

He worked on major ad campaigns around the world; devised antiwar posters; worked for Otto Preminger and Stanley Kubrick; wrote more children’s books; and drew deft cartoons whose pointed social satire mixed healthy outrage with a very European contempt for what passed as moral behavior in American society.

Mr. Ungerer’s studio includes lots of books, a stash of Barbie dolls, mannequin legs, a plastic gun, a portrait of Beethoven and, sitting under a window like a homemade Duchamp, a disconnected toilet.

Gangly in a cable-knit sweater, he resembled an Irish fisherman on holiday. He loves wordplay, dialects and accents, and clearly enjoys acting the outsider: an Alsatian in France, an Irishman in Britain, a European in America . “With three words,” he said, holding up three fingers, “I can deflate any English aristocrat: ‘Are you Irish?’ ”

“He is too intellectual for the job” was his response to the question I finally managed about Frederic Mitterrand, the culture minister criticized over the Polanski case. He defended President Nicolas Sarkozy as a pragmatist who wanted to shake up a stuffy French system, and he calculated that Mr. Polanski had already paid for his crimes, but added that he found nothing more horrific than pedophilia.

Tomi Ungerer — children’s author, erotic artist, collector and illustrator (inset right) — has his own museum in Strasbourg, France. / CHRISTIAN FLIERL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; INSET, TOMI UNGERER