BETWEEN WORLDS: The Art and Design of Leo Lionni

PROVOCATIVE ART DIRECTION

Lionni’s work as the art director at Print (1955-1956) and Fortune (1948-1960) will be explored. In addition to designing striking covers and interior layouts he was instrumental in launching the careers of many younger artists and designers, including celebrated picture book artist Eric Carle. This pivotal section looks at the “Unfinished Business” exhibition that Lionni designed for the United States Pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, which gave a frank account of the struggle for racial justice in 1950s America. Visitors from around the world appreciated the installation’s honesty about the United States’ ongoing efforts to live up to its ideals, but pressure from southern politicians shut down the exhibit long before the fair’s end. As Annie Lionni has aptly noted, her grandfather created his first children’s book one year later.  She sees this as his way of “finishing the business” that had been interrupted in Brussels: Little Blue and Little Yellow and the many picture books that followed were all about community building, problem solving, and striving for a better world. The collage elements of Lionni’s graphic design images became visual building blocks in the realization of that better world on the pages of a book that an open-minded four-year-old could both enjoy and learn from.

CLASSIC MODERNIST PICTURE BOOKS

Original art and preliminary drawings for several of Lionni’s most notable children’s picture books will be on view, including Frederick, Inch by Inch, Pezzettino, Matthew’s Dream, and others, which have been published in foreign-language editions around the world. The Aesop of our time, Lionni was a fabulist and philosopher who brought unexpected psychological and moral depth to the picture book while working within the visual idiom he shared with such post-war International style designers as Paul Rand, and Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames. The artist’s granddaughter Annie Lionni, who is a collaborator on this exhibition, notes that Lionni began creating children’s books in “his retirement years.” “The traditional story of how Leo came to write his first book for children involves my brother, Pippo, and me in 1959. At the time, Leo was an art director at Time Life, and he took us on the commuter train out of Grand Central Station in New York to spend the weekend with him and our grandmother, Nora, in Greenwich, CT. He entertained us by tearing colored paper from a magazine that he had in his briefcase to create the story of Little Blue and Little Yellow. The positive response we gave to his story was enough to inspire him to recreate it with some construction paper in his studio at home. His friend, Fabio Coen, who later became an editor at Pantheon Books, saw the mock-up over the weekend and they decided to publish Little Blue and Little Yellow.” Lionni’s literary legacy includes four Caldecott Honors for excellence in illustration as well as dozens of other prizes, an elementary school curriculum based on his books described in Vivian Gussin Paley’s The Girl with the Brown Crayon, inclusions in best books lists, and countless praise from teachers, librarians, parents, and children.

IMAGINED WORLDS: PARALLEL BOTANY

“Parallel Botany” is the fully elaborated fantasy plant world that Lionni created over a period of years in a variety of media: drawings, prints, bronze sculptures, paintings, and an illustrated artist’s book. These imaginative works circle back to the home terrarium that sparked his childhood love of nature and will serve as a final statement of Lionni’s belief in the importance of embracing nature while also feeling free to re-imagine the world as we find it.

BETWEEN WORLDS EXHIBITION CO-CURATORS

Steven Heller is the co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program and of the SVA Masters Workshop in Rome. He wrote the “Visuals” column for the New York Times Book Review, where he also had a distinguished career as the Book Review’s art director. He has written a weekly column for The Atlantic online and currently writes The Daily Heller / Imprint online. He has written more than 150 introductions/forewords and over 180 books on graphic design, illustration and political art, including The Design Entrepreneur (with Lita Talarico); Paul Rand; Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century; Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design; Citizen Designer; Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits (with Louise Fili); The Anatomy of Design: Uncovering the Influences and Inspirations in Modern Graphic Design (with Mirko Ilic); Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State; and 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design. He is/was a contributing editor for Print, Baseline, Design Observer, Eye. Heller is the recipient of the Eric Carle Museum Carle Honors Award, Art Directors Club Special Educators Award, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, the School of Visual Arts’ Masters Series Award, and the 2011 National Design Award for “Design Mind.” He has received honorary doctorates from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty at the University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic.

Leonard S. Marcus is one of the world’s foremost authorities on children’s books and the people who create them. He is the author or editor of more than 25 award-winning books, including Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon; Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work; Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom; Golden Legacy: The Story of Golden Books; Randolph Caldecott: The Man Who Could Not Stop Drawing; Helen Oxenbury: A Life in Illustration; The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth; and most recently Pictured Worlds, an international history of the illustrated children’s book. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, four-time judge of the Times’ Best Illustrated Books Awards, and a frequent commentator on radio and television. A founding trustee of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, he has curated numerous exhibitions, including the New York Public Library’s landmark exhibit, The ABC Of It: Why Children’s Books Matter (2013-2014), which broke all attendance records and was seen by more than half a million visitors from around the world. Leonard teaches at the School of Visual Arts and lectures about his work across the world, most recently at the national libraries of China, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and France, and at the Bologna and Shanghai Book Fairs. He holds an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the Bank Street College of Education and is the only American to have won the Chen Bochui Award for special contributions to the development of Chinese children’s literature. His literary archive is in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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