Leo Lionni

Leo Lionni died October 11, 1999, at his home in Tuscany, Italy, at the age of 89.

Lionni always thought of himself as an artist. He worked in many disciplines including, especially, drawing, painting, sculpture and photography. He had one-man shows in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He continued to work as an artist until just before his death in 1999.

Among Lionni's books that were not intended for children, the best known is probably Parallel Botany (1978; first published in Italian as La botanica parallela, 1976). This detailed treatise on plants that lack materiality—in other words, imaginary plants—is richly illustrated with drawings of plants in charcoal or pencil and photographs of "parallel botanists". The text is a rich mix of plant descriptions, travel tales, "ancient" myths, and folk etymologies, leavened with historical facts and grounded in actual science. As an imaginary taxonomy, it is invoked by Italo Calvino as a precursor to the Codex Seraphinianus of Luigi Serafini.

In 1960, he moved back to Italy, and began his career as a children's book author and illustrator. Lionni produced more than 40 children's books. He received the 1984 American Institute of Graphic Arts (A.I.G.A.) Gold Medal and was a four-time Caldecott Honor Winner—for Inch by Inch (1961), Swimmy (1964), Frederick (1968), and Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse (1970). He also won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1965.

Leo Lionni would usually draw pictures as he told stories to his grandchildren, but one time he found himself on a long train ride with no drawing materials. Instead, he tore out circles of yellow and blue from a magazine to help him tell the story he had in mind. This experience led him to create his first book for children, Little Blue and Little Yellow (1959).

In 1948, he accepted a position as art director for Fortune, which he held until 1960. He also maintained outside clients, designing The Family of Man catalogue design for the Museum of Modern Art, and was design director for Olivetti, for whom he produced ads, brochures and showroom design.

Over the course of his career, Lionni also held several teaching posts, beginning in 1946, when he taught advertising art at Black Mountain College. He also taught at Parsons School of Design in 1954; the Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, in 1967; the University of Illinois in 1967; and Cooper Union from 1982 to 1985.

In 1939, he moved to Philadelphia and began full-time work in advertising, at which he was extremely successful, acquiring accounts from Ford Motors and Chrysler Plymouth, among others. He commissioned art from Saul Steinberg, the then neophyte Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, and Fernand Léger. He was a member of the Advertising Art Hall of Fame.

From 1931 to 1939, he was a well-known and respected painter in Italy, where he worked in the Futurism and avant-garde styles. In 1935 he received a degree in economics from the University of Genoa. During the later part of this period, Lionni devoted himself more and more to advertising design.

Leo Lionni (May 5, 1910 – October 11, 1999) was an Italian-American writer and illustrator of children's books. Born in the Netherlands, he moved to Italy and lived there before moving to the United States in 1939, where he worked as an art director for several advertising agencies, and then for Fortune magazine. He returned to Italy in 1962 and started writing and illustrating children's books. In 1962, his book Inch by Inch was awarded the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.