Leo Lionni, Artist and Philosopher

Leo Lionni has had a long, varied, and influential career in the visual arts as a painter, graphic designer, writer, and teacher, but his distinctive production has gained its widest audience as a result of the children's books he has written and illustrated. Conceived at the rate of one each year for the past twelve years, these stories are didactic both in word and image, and the cumulative corpus makes a significant statement about Lionni's thought.

His work retains some of the characteristic visual qualities of the 1950's, a design image he influenced and fostered. He continues to have his texts set in Century, a turn-of-the-century font which he revived. His illustrations tend toward flat, poster-like layouts affected by Klee, Matisse, Miro, and Jean Arp. Snippits of printed paper incorporated into complex collages are the artistic mainstay of his books (Fig. 1). Many papers are monoprints of his own fabrication. All share a visual uniformity of repeated surface decoration. Wrapping papers, wall papers, printed Japanese paper (sometimes ornamenting imported goods), marble papers (better known on bookbindings), William Morris designs, doilied, stenciled, potato-printed, flour-pasted, crayoned, watercolored, pastelled, inked, roughly torn or just left alone, they are combined in a rich admixture of flat, simple, chunky forms laid down as a series of interrelated patterned surfaces to achieve a limited, lateral, diorama-like sense of space. Contrasting artistic techniques and mixed media are frequently used in conjunction with these small-patterned papers to lend emphasis to contrasting ideas or states of mind. There is a recurring interplay between opaque and transparent effects, marrying crayon or mat tempera paint with transparent inks, or pen and ink with opulent papers.

Lionni's interest in Surrealism influenced his books. On My Beach There Are Many Pebbles (1961) is devoted to the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic possibilities of striations and faults in pebbles worn by the sea. The Biggest House (1968), concerning the foolish aspirations and ultimate demise of a snail, exploits inconsistencies of scale to distort the natural optical relationship of reader to object. His involvement with the principles of Surrealism in also evident in the recent paintings of "moon-flowers" (metallic plants with amorphous, sometimes flat backgrounds), sculptural collages of branches cast in a Lionni-devised variant of the lost-wax process (using the casting metal to burn out and replace the wooden limbs), and elegant drawings and lithographs of imaginative and imaginary plants (resembling vegetation in its diseased or deformed state in the lineage of seventeenth and eighteenth century botanical drawings).

Examples of all of these are visible in his studio today. They are a logical and understandable outgrowth of the artistic and philosophical thinking of his student days when Surrealism was most influential. But this is only one aspect of the history of imagery which has captured his fancy. Early printed books and popular wood cuts have been particularly appealing to him. As co-editor of Print magazine, a trade journal for the advertising and printing industries, he devoted his column, "The Lion's Tail," principally to aspects of the history of the graphic arts. His interest in surface decoration and patterned surfaces has, over the years, led him to an appreciation of many ornamental arts, with preference given to Persian and Turkish tile-work, Mughal Indian miniatures and Early Christian mosaics. Visual references to the decorative arts have frequently been incorporated into his designs, especially during his tenure as art director of Fortune magazine.

Not only are Lionni's books visually stimulating, but the texts are thoughtful and philosophical: the succinct prose is colorful, sometimes whimsical, sometimes poetic, and always didactic. The stories are essentially contemporary parables. In the best fabulist tradition, most of Lionni's tales center around animal heroes—an age-old device used to make the critical message or moral more palatable to a potentially resistent readership. Fables have long enjoyed favor among illustrators and producers of books, and a number of artists and graphic designers attracted to early printed books have made editions of Aesop: Alexander Calder (New York, 1931) and Antonio Frasconi (Museum of Modern Art...