Questions for Etienne Delessert

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Some questions for

From JUST SO STORIES, R. Kipling. Ill. Etienne Delessert Copyright © 1972, All rights reserved. Doubleday & CO

Etienne Delessert

Intervju: Susanne Sandström

Who is Etienne Delessert?

I was born in Switzerland in 1941, and my father was a very liberal minister: he tried to put some culture-and ethics in my brain, and gave me total freedom to choose my profession. Instead of going to a University, I decided to collaborate with a graphic design studio, as an apprentice. Three years later I was working 14 hours a day, had some clients on my own (art directing a new publishing literary house). At age 21 I moved to Paris as an independent graphic designer and art director for some large advertising agencies. Then I art directed the launching of three new magazines for teenagers, hired illustrators like Alain Le Foll or Georges Lemoine, and found an interest in actually doing some illustrations. So I am really self taught…

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Where did it (picturebook making) all begin?

In 1965 I moved to New York with Eleonore Schmid: we wanted to create children’s books since at the time it was difficult in France to find a good publisher (except for Robert Delpire, but he was issuing a very limited amount of books). In New York Sendak, Ungerer, but also Leo Lionni, André François and Domenico Gnoli were creating wonderful works and were my inspiration to move to the States. André François had showed the way since 1947, often collaborating with Delpire and English publishers. I began working with Eleonore for American magazines like Fortune, Redbook or McCall’s, waiting for the occasion to propose ideas for picture books.

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You were once a “member” of the Press Editions Harlin Quist – a Press that today has cult status – how was it working in the context of that press, with publisher Harlin Quist?

In 1966, I believe, we met Harlin Quist, through his art director, and that was the beginning of our careers. Quist had previously published picture paperbacks for children at the Dell Publishing House. He allowed new comers to express themselves, text and graphics, with great freedom: at the beginning there was a small group of talented, passionate artists, often coming from the advertising or magazine fields, who brought interesting, sometime very avant-garde concepts and designs. Quist, and his art director John Bradford, encouraged them to experiment: they were great at that. We would meet often, finish the day’s work and have dinner together, we felt strongly like a privileged small group of creators. Quist was charming, in turn exuberant and secret,with perverse efforts to destroy friendships between his artists...

You have been said to be one of the fathers of the modern children´s picturebook – can you tell us about this free spirited, creative/experimental and, often, provocative period in the history of Picture Books? Was it all that? What did you want to accomplish with your picturebooks? Any regrets?

There were fewer pictures books than now, they could be seen in the bookstores much longer. With the artists who had started in the 50’and 60’ we were trying to present playful, or dramatic stories that would stimulate the mind of our readers, young or old. To break from the too genteel world of commercial books that were used to ”put kids to sleep”, without engaging them. And clearly we believed that the art in the books should be at the highest level of graphics. We proclamed that there are not High Art and low « commercial » printed art, but just good or bad images.

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Sendak could mine the anxieties of his youth -and the drama of the Jewish recent past, Ungerer could juggle with silly characters and provocative ideas. I, after a few years, brought the sense of a surrealist ambiguity, the concept that there is nothing simple in this world, and give a sparkle - soul- to the eyes of the animals I painted (The Endless Party)

Your picture books, Stories 1-2-3-4, with Eugene Ionesco, – could you tell us the story behind them?

While most illustrators follow closely the line of the story, I took some liberties, just like in a film: sometime an image would carry the story, extending it, touching the reader in a way that only imaginative evocations can, changing reality through spirited images. The four stories by Ionesco are a good example of the style of my game. Soon my drawings had a very distinctive ” Delessert » look.They were called conceptual... We were on 42nd street in New York, facing Grand Central, in 1967 probably, and Quist suggested that, after two books written and or illustrated by Eleonore and I (The Tree and The Endless Party) I should perhaps illustrate someone else’s text. I immediately answered: – Give me story by Beckett or Ionesco, and I’ll work on it!” Quist was surprised, but, and that was what made him unique, he asked his new French partner François Ruy-Vidal to contact Ionesco, who saw my drawings and accepted the collaboration. The first Story was published before I ever met Ionesco, and I heard that he was at first taken aback by the vivacity of the little girl in the story. He had never thought too much about children’s books, and a three year old character for him should have looked and acted more like a quiet, blond British cute little girl…Of the past. Soon he discovered that the « family theater » of these four stories reminded him of the exchanges, full of crisp images, he had had with his own

Ur: How the Mouse Was Hit on the Head by a Stone and So Discovered the World, Etienne Delessert Copyright ©1971, All rights reserved. Doubleday & CO

Ur: Story 1, (1968), E. Ionesco & E. Delessert. Editions Harlin Quist

Ur: Story 1, (1968), E. Ionesco & E. Delessert. Editions Harlin Quist

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daughter, way back. It had been a fun circus then! She had talent too. It took me 40 years to complete the pictures of the four stories. Ionesco, Eleonore Schmid, Rick Schreiber and everybody else understood soon that we would never be paid, even if the books were clearly successful, with reprints and foreign editions. Printers and photoengravers were suing Quist. I always wondered were the money went: Harlin, before being a great publisher, had been a noted Off-Broadway producer, and who knows, he may have spent our royalties in investing on the side in new productions that were never staged. After quitting publishing, he went back to the theater in northern Minnesota. So I decided not to work with his company ever again, and it was quite sad. It was quite a challenge, so many years -a life- later, to make sure that the Stories No 3 and 4 would have the same fresh approach as the first two books. Knowing also that, as the mean pirate he was, Quist had asked two other artists, Philippe Corentin and Nicole Claveloux, to illustrate the stories clearly included in my contract…Well, Harlin, and sometimes François Ruy -Vidal proved that their independence, even crooked, could produce interesting picture books: it is the reason of this hommage.

What does your creative working process look like?

Over the years I have written and illustrated more than 40 books -and provided images for many more. They sail in many directions, from personnal adaptations of known fables (Big and Bad or The Seven Dwarfs) to books about color, numbers or the alphabet.

You have illustrated more than 80 books (translated in 14 languages, but alas not Swedish!) – which ones are you most content with? Why those?

The Endless Party from 1967, my very first book, a very laic evocation of Noah’s Arch venture (I revisited it recently in Fuzzy,

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Furry Hat). Also How the Mouse was hit on the head by a stone and so discovered the world in 1971, an experimental book in collaboration with Jean Piaget, Ashes, Ashes, probably my best, where I suggest that, even when we change our life and move to another country, we repeat the same mistakes. Or A Glass, a recent hommage to my stepmother, Night Circus in which I see a weird, surreal little circus pass by slowly on a road of my Connecticut, leading me to an unknown, diffusely lit world. An interpretation of Ubu Roi for Gallimard is brutal enough to portray our times... And, evidently, the 12 new books of my Yok-Yok little character with a big red hat, explaining the mysteries of Nature.

For many years I have been also involved in magazine illustration (often even more than in book creation).But a great wind has erased that part of my life. I’ll work on a new story every two years or so, and I have exhibitions of my paintings since 1974. I was blessed with large retrospectives in Paris, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in le Louvre (1975), in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (1991), at the Library of Congress in Washington DC (1994), at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (1998) or at the Centre de l’Illustration in Moulins, France (in 2010) at the Eric Carle Museum (2011) and at the Ecole Estienne in Paris (2013), For the last 25 years most of my books were published first by The Creative Editions in Mankato (MN). My wife Rita Marshall has been their creative director since 1985, in the tradition of style and the spirit of originality I had found at the beginning of the Quist venture. For me Creative is by far the best picture book publishing in the States, with 20 titles of fiction and 130 non-fiction titles produced a year for the schools and public libraries- in France they would be seen in bookstores.

What are you currently working on

In 2015 I wrote l’Ours bleu, 250 pages of a career in graphic art and publishing, memories of the ups and downs of a life spent on two continents (some people say that Connecticut is the Switzerland of the USA…) And in 2017 I initiated a Swiss foundation called Les Maîtres de l’Imaginaire, to assemble and archive of a superb collection of the works of noted artists who have created picture books, in Europe and the United States. There is also a long term pedagogic program to teach children-and adults, to better read under the surface of images, based on these narrative pictures: it is my way to honor the Masters. And remember those who were part of the early Harlin Quist team, a long, long time ago.

Logga för: © Fondation Les Maîtres de l’Imaginaire

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