Leo Lionni

Remembering Leo Lionni

When I was the publisher of Knopf Books for Young Readers, it was always good news to hear from Leo Lionni's editor, Frances Foster, that Leo would be coming into the office that day to deliver a new book. Unlike the picture books of all the other authors and artists we published, Leo's new books were always total surprises to us. He may have told Frances that he was working on something, but we never knew what. Nor did he follow the usual working relationship between an editor and an author-artist by submitting a manuscript and sketches for comments or editorial suggestions. But then there was nothing usual about Leo. He was supremely confident that his story and finished art were perfect and that we would love it. And we always did.

In my opinion, Leo's many accomplishments in art, both commercial and fine, sets him apart from all other children's book illustrators. Born in 1910, he grew up surrounded by art in Holland where he steeped himself in the Dutch masters and taught himself how to draw from plaster casts of classical statues in the famous Rijksmuseum, just a few blocks from his childhood home. Through his Uncle Willem, whose passion was collecting modern art, Leo at an early age became as familiar with then relatively unknown contemporary artists--Chagall, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian--as he was with Rembrandt or Vermeer.

As a young man, he embraced new ideas as exemplified in the philosophy of the Bauhaus and the avant-garde artists of the 20th century. Before he created his first children's book in 1959 he had already been head of the graphic design department at Parsons School, lecturer at Yale University, art director of Fortune, co-editor of Print, design director of the Olivetti Corporation of America, and art director of one of the largest advertising agencies in America. His strong graphic-art approach to illustration made him a natural creator of posters, some of which rallied the American home front during World War II and are now in the Museum of Modern Art archives. So it was from this background that he came to children's books, influenced not by other children's book illustrators, but by the world's body of great art and design.

He usually spent spring and summer at his beloved Tuscan farmhouse near Rada in Chianti, and fall and winter at his apartment in New York City. Most of his children's books were conceived and completed in Italy where he was close to nature. The beauty he saw in pebbles and blades of grass, caterpillars and crows--all manner of flora and fauna--was an integral part of his books for children. Once during a long phone conversation he began absent-mindedly doodling a lizard like the playful little ones that scurried about on the stones outside his studio. But this one he drew standing on its hind legs. And soon thereafter the story of Cornelius, a crocodile who saw and changed the world because he walked upright, evolved. He liked to think that a little mouse he once saw in his garden became Frederick, who made the winter days pass more quickly for the other mice with his stored-up poetry of summer. And from a pier off Martha's Vineyard, his observation of a school of minnows was perhaps the beginning of Swimmy, who found a way to outsmart the big bully fish through cooperation.

Leo was probably the first children's book artist to use collage, and we can speculate that his first two children's books, Little Blue and Little Yellow and Inch by Inch, inspired Ezra Jack Keats to use collage a few years later in his Caldecott Medal book The Snowy Day. It is safe to say that since then countless others have been influenced by not only Leo's use of collage, but by the clean graphic look of his art. Though Leo used many different techniques--straight collage, collage and oil stick, graphite and collage, collage and mixed media, colored pencil and oil stick--he always used ample white space to make his art stand out and to carry the type. (The one exception was The Greentail Mouse, executed in oil and with no white space within the art.) Eric Carle credits Leo with not only encouraging him to create children's books, but with making him realize that sophisticated graphic design can speak directly to children.

As modern as Leo's art is--very much in a Bauhaus mode--it is curious that he consistently chose Century Schoolbook, a variant on a very old serif typeface, for the text in his books. That type has always been considered easier for young children to read than most other fonts, and that may have been why he used it. But somehow it is difficult to imagine his books with a modern san serif type. His choice of type font, size, and placement work perfectly with his art, proof yet again why he was considered one of the truly brilliant art directors and designers of the 20th-century.

Adults are attracted to his books through his art, but what of children? Among Leo's many gifts was his ability to understand how a child's mind works. He knew that children respond to and identify with stories about animals. And so the stories that he created are simple fables, using animals to show a human attribute or value. The tales do not hammer home a moral--they are primarily entertaining--but most children come away from them with a new understanding of sharing, cooperating, individuality, peace, diplomacy, and other underlying pinnings of the tales.

I like to think of Leo as a 20th-century Aesop who opened the doors of children's books to the best that modern art and design has to offer. He was honored with an American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal and he received four Caldecott Honor Book Silver Medals for his children's books. He died at the age of 89 in 1999, but his books will live on to delight and enrich children throughout the world.

--Janet Schulman
Vice-president and Editor-at-large
Random House Children's Books