Art in Many Forms

In the 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 to the early Italian of the 15th century and its quiet, still sort of thing." Says Lionni himself: "It's a question of always keeping the tightest coherence between the means at your disposal and what you're trying to achieve. Design, which is primarily communication, must be competitive. Painting, which is primarily expression, must be spontaneous. I am completely capable of forgetting one when I'm doing the other."

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.

As an art 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: "I am obsessed with one basic statement: man's loneliness, his fundamental incapability of communicating--and this is his tragedy. I try for the fixed and breathless static moment when man comes to grips with his condition."

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