I have a confession: I only recently learned the name Leo Lionni, even if I’ve previously admired his work. Many of you will know Lionni through his graphic design for companies such as Olivetti and The Container Corp. Perhaps less familiar is that he was also a children’s book author-illustrator, a fine artist, and a former editor of PRINT (1955-56). Lionni’s entire oeuvre has not be exhibited together in this country until now.
The Norman Rockwell Museum presents Lionni’s full story in the exhibition Between Worlds: The Art and Design of Leo Lionni, co-curated by writer and historian Leonard Marcus and Steven Heller. Read Steven Heller’s thoughts on the exhibition in The Daily Heller.
I recently sat down with Leonard Marcus to discuss Lionni, his work, and the exhibition. There were many highlights for me. One is his multidisciplinary yet compartmentalized talent. Another is the deeply thoughtful and philosophical way in which he wrote and illustrated for children.
Courtesy of the Lionni Family
These days, we recognize and celebrate multidisciplinary creativity. It wasn’t always the case. As a working graphic designer in the era of abstract expressionism, Lionni and his fellow applied artists understood that their commercial work wasn’t viewed as ART. In the pecking order of the art world, applied artists couldn’t be fine artists as well. Children’s book illustrators worked under the weight of dual sins: they depicted the narrative realm during an era when the abstract was king, queen, and jury, and in the hierarchy of publishing, works for children were an afterthought.
Despite narrative art being the main Western art tradition, Marcus says that “many illustrators of Lionni’s era had to resist the pressure to draw abstractly from their instructors in art school. To become an illustrator in those days, you had to rebel against a very strong orthodoxy that discouraged the narrative.” (The art critic Clement Greenberg once called illustration “prostitution.”) So, when you consider that children’s book art was one of few realms that sustained narrative art during the time it wasn’t favored, “Lionni’s book illustrations come into focus in a different way,” says Marcus.
Courtesy of the Lionni Family
Piecing Together a World
Seeing the whole picture of Lionni’s creativity helps us understand and admire him all the more. As the child of an art-loving family in Amsterdam (Marc Chagall’s Le Violonniste hung outside his bedroom), Lionni received an education focused on nature, arts, and crafts. As a young adult in Italy, he rubbed shoulders with the Futurists, who emphasized dynamism and progress. Emigrating to the US in 1939 on the eve of WWII, Lionni had experienced a lifetime’s worth of adversity at the hands of others’ small-mindedness. You can see how his experiences shaped his work, which often incorporate collage elements: how an individual thing (a child, a shape, a concept) informs and inspires the bigger picture (a community, a composition, an outlook).
“Collage became an important way of art-making after World War I. With European society in shatters, artists like Kurt Schwitter set out to put it back together. You can view Lionni in this aesthetic tradition, along with Ezra Jack Keats and Eric Carle,” says Marcus. “Collage is also a common way of making art that children do from a young age. Lionni’s work suggests that we need not be reverential towards the art but rather to offer up to people with open minds a way to think boldly about what the world could be.”
The subtext of Lionni’s books for children is ‘What if?’
Leonard Marcus
Lionni’s children’s book illustrations are not just about beautiful pictures, “Leo realized that children are the people who can change their minds.” Marcus says, “He was making art to shape the future. He was always aware of what was happening in society. He didn’t want to tell people what to do, but rather offer up to people with open minds to think in a big way about what the world could be.”
Vivian Paley, a kindergarten teacher in Chicago, recognized this future-creating theme in Lionni’s books and that they built on each other. “They are reconsiderations, one after another, of the relationship of the individual to society,” says Marcus. Paley understood this is an issue that always comes up for children, so she created a year-long curriculum using Lionni’s picture books. “Lionni’s children’s books help children find their place in that constellation of alternatives.”
© Leo Lionni. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Lionni Family
Marcus’ favorite is Lionni’s award-winning Inch by Inch, and he believes it’s where his signature style came together for the first time. “Lionni’s depiction of ‘out of frame’ images–the crane is so big it doesn’t fit on the page–is mindblowing from the perspective of a child trying to understand what’s going on. His children’s books speak to the power of what art can do, how it can stretch your way of thinking about things.”
Between Worlds: The Art and Design of Leo Lionni is on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum until May 2024.
Image galleries:
1) Left: Leo Lionni (1910-1999), World on View, n.d. Poster, © Leo Lionni. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Lionni Family; Middle: Leo Lionni (1910-1999), New Building Techniques, 1956, Cover design for Fortune, March 1956, Tearsheet, © Leo Lionni. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Lionni Family; Right: Leo Lionni (1910-1999), Two famous globetrotters. The smaller one—the Olivetti Lettera 22—travels the year and the world ‘round, 1957, Advertisement for Olivetti’s “Lettera 22,” reprinted from The New Yorker, December 7, 1957, Tearsheet, © Leo Lionni. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Lionni Family
2) Left: Leo Lionni (1910-1999), And so the days went by, Illustration for Fish is Fish, 1970 (Knopf), Colored pencil on paper, © Leo Lionni. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Lionni Family; Right: Leo Lionni (1910-1999), “And hang from my tail.” Cornelius was amazed, Illustration for Cornelius: A Fable, 1983 (Pantheon), Mixed media collage, © Leo Lionni. All rights reserved., Courtesy of the Lionni Family
Banner artwork:
Leo Lionni (1910-1999), Cover illustration for Frederick, 1967 (Knopf), Mixed media collage, © Leo Lionni. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Lionni Family. (left) Leo Lionni (1910-1999), BDC Rex Rotary M-4, n.d., Brochure for BDC (Bond Duplicator Company, New York, New York), © Leo Lionni. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Lionni Family (right)