Leo Lionni first saw the light of day on May 5, 1910, in a suburb of Amsterdam. Some eighty-seven years later, in his autobiography, he mused about his birth.

"It had been a hectic, scary day, but, in retrospect, a good one. . . . Two fives—my hands. Ten, my fingers. I would be making things."

And make things he did: paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings, mosaics, designs, posters, advertisements—and forty children’s books. He became widely recognized as one of the most distinguished and innovative designers and artists of the twentieth century. His life, most especially his early, formative years, bears testimony to how his everyday experiences, his family, and his surroundings influenced him as an artist and creative thinker.

Leo Lionni’s father, Louis, like many who worked in the Dutch diamond industry, was a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors had fled the Spanish Inquisition . Leo’s mother was the budding young opera singer Elizabeth Grossouw, who came from a Dutch Christian family.

When Leo was five years old, his father became a certified public accountant and the Lionnis moved to a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood in bustling Amsterdam. As an only child, Leo spent a great deal of time in his attic room with the things that interested him most.

I was allowed to gather and collect the abundant, varied, and often smelly evidence of my vehement passion for nature.

His room became a miniature zoo and botany laboratory filled with jars containing live insects; aquariums containing minnows, tadpoles, snails, and shrimp; and cages with mice and birds. Best of all were his terrariums where he could create tiny environments for snakes, toads, salamanders, and frogs. In addition to all these live creatures, he had boxes of shells and pebbles and displays of butterflies and beetles, and hanging on strings running the length of the room were leaves, seedpods, feathers, and dried flowers.

The protagonists of my fables are the same frogs, mice, sticklebacks, turtles, snails, and butterflies that more than three-quarters of a century ago lived in my room.

Leo’s uncle Piet, an architect and an artist, gave Leo his first lessons in drawing and a table to put in his room with the Nature Table. It was the Art Table where Leo painted, drew, carved, glued, and modeled clay. The dashing and flamboyant Uncle Piet was Leo’s hero.

The two great Amsterdam museums, the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk, which were bursting with Rembrandts, Halses, Vermeers, and other world-renowned Dutch paintings, were only a few blocks from Leo’s home. On Saturday mornings, while his schoolmates played soccer, Leo went to the Rijksmuseum with his pencils and sketchpad. He had special permission to draw in the hall of plaster casts of famous statues. By sketching there and thanks to the art lessons that were part of his elementary school curriculum, he sharpened his skill of seeing and remembering.

I don’t need to consult nature books to copy the shapes, colors, and textures of insects and reptiles, rodents and birds, pebbles and seashells. I simply copy them from the images that were stored away in my memory.

Leo was also exposed to many of the new young artists of the early twentieth century, artists who half a century later became world-famous with a kind of art very different from the traditional Dutch art that Leo saw in the museums. His uncle Willem was an enthusiastic collector of these avant-garde painters—Chagall, Klee, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and others. Since Willem traveled a lot, he stored his collection at Leo’s home and with other relatives. A Chagall that Leo remembered fondly as a cheerful green-faced fiddler on a roof hung just outside the door to Leo’s room.

When I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer was always, without hesitation, "An artist."

In 1922 Leo’s parents went to America, his father to find a more lucrative job and his mother to launch her career in the American opera world. They left twelve-year-old Leo with his stepgrandfather and grandmother, who lived in Brussels. During that time Leo often visited his aunt Mies and her Belgian husband, who had one of the largest modern art collections—six Picassos, several Mirós (one of which is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York), a de Chirico, a Modigliani, and a Max Ernst, to name a few. Leo studied them passionately.

After two years of living in Brussels, Leo joined his parents in Philadelphia. He attended a Quaker school, where he made fast progress in learning English. But after just a year there, Leo’s father announced that he was being promoted and transferred to Genoa, Italy. When his mother said they would all have to learn Italian, Leo shouted excitedly:

My fifth language!

Adding a rudimentary command of Italian to his knowledge of Dutch, German, French, and English, Leo began high school in Genoa. It was the first time he had attended a coed school. And he promptly got a crush on a girl named Adda Maffi. But it was eventually Adda’s younger sister, Nora, with whom he fell in love—and Nora with Leo.

Leo and Nora were married in 1931. Their son Mannie was born in 1933. In spite of the chilling political climate leading up to World War II, Leo thrived in Italy. He became a well-known and respected artist, painting in the Futurist and avant-garde styles. He was part of an international set of anti-Fascist intellectuals and artists.

Everywhere I went I met people, young and old, who knew how to keep the embers of freedom burning.

In 1938, shortly before Leo and Nora’s second son, Paolo, was born, the fascist and anti-Semitic Italian government demanded to know whether Leo was Aryan. It was dangerous for Jews to remain in Europe. The Lionnis began preparing to leave before the inevitable war began.

In March of 1939, Leo sailed into New York harbor. He had no job and not much money, but with the help of his father’s former boss in Philadelphia, he was hired by one of America’s largest advertising agencies, N. W. Ayer & Son. On the day the German Army marched into Poland, Leo received a cable from Nora with the news that the U.S. visas for her and the children had been granted. They sailed for America on September 12, just days before Italy declared war.

Without any formal training in design, Leo very quickly became one of the top art directors in America. He worked on many of N. W. Ayer’s biggest and most challenging accounts, such as Ford Motors, Chrysler, and the Container Corporation of America. He made the slogan “Never underestimate the power of a woman” famous for the Ladies’ Home Journal in a series of ads and merchandise. He brought a new and exciting look to advertising by commissioning art from Saul Steinberg, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, and the young Andy Warhol. But in 1948 he began to get restless.

I began to hate myself for being an advertising man...I didn’t want another job, I wanted my own studio in New York.

He wanted the freedom to express himself through his art in ways that didn’t fit into a nine-to-five job at an advertising agency. And he got it when he moved to New York and opened a small office. He became the art director of Fortune on his own terms—just three days a week. That began a long relationship with Time/Life projects, including a prototype design for Sports Illustrated. He also worked with many other clients. He designed the Museum of Modern Art’s famous catalog The Family of Man. As the design director of Olivetti, he not only designed for ads and brochures but also the company’s showrooms. The most talked-about one on Fifth Avenue in New York featured a sleek Olivetti typewriter mounted outside the showroom on a modern art pedestal, tempting passersby to try it. He designed an American Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair to show America as "a work in progress." It was titled "Unfinished Business," showing a long tunnel of photos of civil rights protests and other unresolved problems in American society. Leo was one of the founders of the International Design Conference at Aspen, Colorado, annually attended by hundreds of designers and thinkers with the goal of coming up with solutions to critical world problems. He was also coeditor of Print, a new magazine devoted to elevating graphic design and commentary, a role he found most satisfying. He was named Art Director of the Year by the National Society of Art Directors in 1955 and was awarded the Architectural League Gold Medal in 1956.

In 1959, at the top of his career, he decided he would retire on his fiftieth birthday, move to Italy, and follow his own creative spirit.

I reached the conviction that all human acts have social and political consequences....You must feel responsible for every line you draw, for every decision you make.

Then, shortly after he made his momentous decision...

a little miracle happened.

He was taking his two young grandchildren, Pippo and Annie, from Grand Central Station to his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. When the two youngsters began acting up, he said, "I’ll tell you a story." He pulled out of his briefcase an advance copy of Life and began tearing out pages of the magazine, and from them, small round pieces of various colors.

I put my briefcase on my knees to make a table and in a deep voice said, "This is Little Blue, and this is Little Yellow," as I placed the round pieces of colored paper onto the leather stage.

His grandchildren were mesmerized by the story (as were the adult passengers sitting within hearing distance). When they got home, Leo showed the children how to make the story into a book. And it was a book they could “read,” even though they were too young to actually know how to read. They were thrilled with their accomplishment. The next night Fabio Coen, a friend who was a children’s book editor, came to dinner at the Lionnis’, saw the little book, and decided, right then and there, to publish it.

But it would take more than one evening with Fabio before I could fully understand how much the simple little tale of two blobs of color would affect my soul, my mind, and my way of life.

During the next thirty-five years, Leo created forty children’s books. Four—Inch by Inch, Swimmy, Frederick, and Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse—were named Caldecott Honor Books. Many were named Notable Children’s Books of the Year by the American Library Association and were honored by the New York Times. Almost all are still in print and available from Alfred A. Knopf.

With Swimmy, published in 1963, Leo discovered his talent for creating original fables or little lessons in life that resonate with children throughout the world. Thanks to his witnessing the rise of fascism in Europe, his fervent advocacy of peace and human rights is often reflected in his books, such as The Alphabet Tree, written during the Vietnam War; Tillie and the Wall, published eight months before the fall of the Berlin Wall; and Nicolas, Where Have You Been?, a story about overcoming prejudice.

His innovative use of collage, white space, and clean, modern design was a major influence on Eric Carle, Ezra Jack Keats, and other children’s book artists. In 2007 the Society of Illustrators awarded him a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award.

Leo did retire from commercial endeavors, and he and Nora did move to Italy, where they bought an old stone farmhouse in Tuscany. Leo placed a huge sculpture by his friend Alexander Calder on the lawn between the house and his studio and set his own fantasy flower sculptures all around the terrace. He created most of his children’s books there. But he also found it impossible to give up New York City entirely. He would spend about half of the year in Tuscany and the other half in his apartment in Manhattan. His life was divided between two worlds—Europe and America, and art and commerce. Thus the title of his autobiography, Between Worlds. Leo Lionni died in Italy on October 11, 1999, at the age of eighty-nine.

Written By Janet Schulman
With excerpts from Between Worlds copyright © 1997 Leo Lionni. Used with permission.

I sat down to write about my grandfather Leo Lionni and was instantly overwhelmed by the amount that had already been written by and about him. While I am happy to reiterate the things that have already been stated, I would like to add some of the characteristics and stories that a family member would think of. It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to a little bit of the man behind the books.

Leo was born in Amsterdam on May 5, 1910. He was the only child of an opera-singing mother and an accountant father. Is it any wonder that his first recognized successes were in the world of commercial art? Leo worked as an art director for N.W. Ayer in Philadelphia and for Time-Life, Inc., in New York before taking on his own clients.

One of Leo’s great strengths was his ability to recognize opportunity when it was presented. Several of his most popular ad campaigns were developed from ideas that nearly slipped through the cracks. The popular “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman” campaign for Ladies’ Home Journal was one such occasion. That phrase had been discarded when Leo noticed it sitting in a wastepaper basket and realized that it was perfect for the Journal’s ad campaign. Many of his adventures and longtime associations came about as the result of unplanned meetings with his friends and colleagues. My grandparents were living on the Italian Riviera when, after an informal meal with friends in Tuscany, Leo and my grandmother Nora decided to move to that part of Italy. They lived there for many years, and Leo died there on October 11, 1999.

How Leo’s first children’s book came about was, similarly, kismet. My grandfather started writing children’s books after an exercise in entertaining me and my brother during a boring train trip. The distraction that he created for us resulted in Little Blue and Little Yellow. Its publication was gratifying to him, and he found that children’s books gave him an outlet for his creativity that was also applauded by others. Before long, he was doing a book every year or so.

As with other coincidental events in Leo’s life, his careers in design and children’s books overlapped. Leo’s first books were published several years before he retired from commercial art. The media and the techniques he used, at any given time, were consistent between careers. Perhaps the clearest example of this can be seen in Pezzettino, published in 1975. The mosaics of Pezzettino are reminiscent of both the fine art that Leo was working on in his studio at that time and the ad campaigns and images that he was creating on behalf of his clients.

As I got older, Leo would often show me his books during their formation or just prior to sending them off to his publisher. I was always amazed at how he would mull over an idea in his head, sometimes making a few sketches. But ordinarily, he would sit down at his table and create a book in the course of three weeks—cover to cover. He had a way of knowing what would work and what would not. He saw the whole story—all the art, all the words, the whole package—before he started to produce the actual pages.

Leo had tiny hands for a man his size. Somehow, even though his hands were always in contact with pencils and paint and other dirty art supplies, they were always clean. Leo’s messes were always meticulous. Perhaps he would credit that to having been the only child in a family of adults.

Like Pezzettino, Leo thought a lot about his relationship to the rest of the world. He thought about where he fit in, and when and where he set himself apart from other people and other movements, politics, and fads. I have always maintained that he was the hero in each of his books. He was Swimmy, Cornelius, Tico, Matthew, and most certainly Frederick. Through his animal heroes, he was able to explore and express his own limits and ideals.

While he has been credited with being an innovator in the worlds of graphic design and children’s books, he believed strongly in a classic arts education. The rules were meant to be broken and redefined only after developing an appreciation for, and mastering, formal style. He felt that children should take formal drawing lessons to develop technique and artistic discipline.

Leo loved music. I never saw him look at a piece of sheet music, but he could play anything he heard. He used to play the accordion when I was little. My grandmother and I would move the furniture back, roll up the rugs, and dance to his polkas. A few years later, he taught me to clap in rhythm for him as he learned to play flamenco guitar. He picked up sitar lessons in India and, finally, when he was in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease, when one foot in front of another seemed too complicated, he played all his old favorites at my piano with ease and unmitigated joy.

—Annie Lionni
January 31, 2006

Ann Lionni is the granddaughter of Leo Lionni and lives in New York with her husband and four children. Her grandmother, Nora, lives upstairs. In celebration of the reissue of Pezzettino, we have asked her for some thoughts about her grandfather.

Copyright © 2006 by Ann Lionni. Used by permission of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from Random House.