Word: lionni
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...modern art world of abstractions and specializations, Leo Lionni is a phenomenon-a genuinely versatile man. He is one of the world's most original designers. He is also a serious and talented painter. Last week the Massachusetts Worcester Art Museum put Lionni's versatility on display. Said Worcester's Director Daniel Catton Rich: "Many of the commercial artists in this country are sort of soured artists. Lionni is not. He is a rounded artist. As a painter, he has taken the unusual path of going through the abstract to the representational, now goes back...
Born in Amsterdam in 1910, Lionni was raised in Genoa and Milan, where he rubbed shoulders with the futurists, was "adopted" by the futurists' spokesman, Benedetto Marinetti, who ebulliently proclaimed him at 18 "a great aeropainter." Even then Lionni had a taste for variety. He exhibited his oils and wrote movie reviews while he was getting a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Genoa (1935). He came to the U.S. in 1939, almost immediately established himself as a fresh new talent in U.S. design...
...director of N. W. Ayer & Son in Philadelphia, he supervised Container Corp. of America's famed series that brought modern art into advertising layout. As design director for Olivetti, Lionni produced displays, designed new showrooms in San Francisco and Chicago. He has designed posters for Family Service, fountains for housing projects, displays for the U.S. Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair, is currently (among other things) art director of FORTUNE. But he has also kept on painting, producing a series of austere, severely painted portraits of men and women, remote and haunted-eyed. Says Lionni...
Capitol was one of the first to dress up record jackets with brightly colored photographs and prints. Columbia hired top artists (among them: Ben Shahn, Leo Lionni, Antonio Frasconi) to design its album covers. For the lower-browed mar ket, Decca tied in the sales campaign with popular magazines, last week spun out its Esquire series of albums decorated with long-stemmed Petty girls...