Eric Carle

Born in Syracuse, New York, to immigrants from Germany, Eric found his calling at an early age. But the young artist’s progress was disrupted by his family’s move to Stuttgart—then in thrall to the Nazi regime—when he was 6.

Uprooted, he was confronted by the anti-Semitic vandalism of Kristallnacht and the Allied bombing of Stuttgart. At 15, he dug trenches at the western front alongside prisoners of war and saw men die in front of him. But the artist within was awakened by works of “degenerate art”—by Picasso, Klee, and the German Expressionists—that a daring teacher had shown him, surreptitiously. Both the works themselves and the teacher’s courage made an indelible impression, one which would profoundly shape the artist he would become.

After the war, Eric faced a choice: he yearned to become a fine artist, but to make a living he would need to pursue commercial art. He enrolled in the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, where he studied graphic design and color theory with Bauhaus-trained artists and typography under influential book designer F. H. Ernst Schneidler. These studies would become the foundation of his practice.

In 1952 Eric returned to New York with a portfolio of work for Amerika Haus (a cultural exchange program) and the fashion magazine Schwabe: Der neue Schnitt that impressed future children’s illustrator Leo Lionni, then art director of Fortune. Lionni recommended Eric to the promotions department of The New York Times. After five months at the Times, Eric was drafted and posted back to Germany. There he resumed creating posters and met and married Dorothea Wohlenberg. Two years later, he returned with Dorothea to New York and his job at the Times. They would have two children, Cirsten and Rolf, eventually divorcing in 1963.

Eric would go on to enjoy a successful career in advertising, creating unconventional campaigns during the “Mad Men” era for L. W. Frohlich, a pharmaceutical agency. For Eric, advertising wasn’t just a day job: he found in its challenges an endless source of creative inspiration. In 1963 he went freelance, designing book jackets and album covers and illustrating books for adults and children, while continuing to create captivating ad campaigns. It was his work for the antihistamine Chlor-Trimeton, featuring tissue paper-collaged animals, that motivated editor Bill Martin Jr. to ask Eric to illustrate his own book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (Henry Holt, 1967).

This collaboration with Martin pointed Eric in a new direction. He began creating his own children’s books beginning with 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo (Penguin, 1968) and The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Penguin, 1969), bringing his adventurous approach to collage, graphic design, and typography to a new audience. Understanding that children are tactile, he employed ingenious book-making techniques like die-cut holes, different-sized pages, flaps, accordion folds, and touchable surfaces.

Creating picture books unleashed much of what had been repressed by German discipline and years of catering to clients. From his studio in Northampton, Massachusetts, Eric used his signature hand-painted tissue paper as a painter would a palette to create abstract works such as his Kimono series, influenced by his travels in Japan. He wove tissue paper and aluminum strips into square armatures, and made collages of painted acetate and foil that are like abstract expressionist bursts of color and line. He created whimsical metal sculptures of animals and painted rolls of Tyvek for costumes and backdrops for a staged concert of The Magic Flute. He assembled his Klee Angels from paint tubes, latex gloves, and pieces of cardboard boxes with their shipping labels intact. Wielding a razor blade like a pencil, he created stylized renditions of quotations, cherished name cards for family and friends, and posters for causes he was passionate about, such as children’s literacy and the environment.

In 2002, impressed by Japan’s museums of picture book art, Eric and his second wife Barbara Morrison founded The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, the first American museum dedicated to the art of the picture book, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Among the over 9,000 objects in its permanent collection are works by Jerry Pinkney, Ludwig Bemelmans, Wanda Gág, Hilary Knight, Sophie Blackall, Raul Colón, Kwame Alexander, Ed Young, Arthur Rackham, Maurice Sendak, Roger Mello, Barbara McClintock, and other diverse classic and contemporary visual storytellers.

Eric died at the age of 91, bequeathing his non-picture book art to The Eric and Barbara Carle Foundation. The Foundation is devoted to the promotion and preservation of Eric Carle’s remarkable body of work and the legacy of this singular artist while also supporting the Museum, cultural events and institutions, and charities working to preserve and protect animals and the environment.