Étienne Delessert

Delessert, Étienne (1941– ), Swiss illustrator, writer, publisher, film director, and contributor of illustrations to magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and Punch, who moved to the United States in 1965. Delessert perceives his brand of illustration to be an interpretation of the general story. For instance, in his illustrations for Eugene Ionesco's children's book Story Number One for Children under Three Years of Age (1968), Delessert tries to highlight the story's ‘social comment on conformity’. Interested in the child's perspective of natural phenomena, Delessert worked with the child psychologist Jean Piaget on How the Mouse was Hit on the Head by a Stone and So Discovered the World (1969). In 1973 he established Carabosse Studios, where he produced commercials and animated films for children, including pieces for Sesame Street. In 1977 he put together a series of children's books, ‘Éditions Tournesol’ (‘Sunflower Editions’), in collaboration with Gallimard, and in 1982 supervised the production of a fairy‐tale series which published ‘unsugarcoated’ versions of tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Fitcher's Bird’, and ‘Bluebeard’. Delessert illustrated Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (1972), Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince (1977), and Mme de Villeneuve's La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1984). Through his illustrations, Delessert aims to expose children to ‘another kind of reality’.

— Anne Duggan