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scenery and a harmonious and joyful way of life is evident in many picturebooks released in the first five years after the end of the war. Fairy tales and fantastic stories predominated, while realistic stories mostly showed people’s everyday lives in a rural setting untouched by the atrocities of war and the struggle for survival. Despite these conservative and sometimes even nostalgic tendencies, a wealth of publishers and illustrators were drawn to the once proscribed modernist traditions of the 1920s and 1930s. By establishing a new connection to the broken avant-garde ambitions in the realm of picturebook design, they contributed to the renewal of the picturebook as an art form, which was subject to ideological misuse and propagandistic effects during the war years. Picturebooks created by exiled authors and illustrators as well as heretofore unpublished modernist picturebooks could find a niche with ambitious small publishers, despite having limited commercial potential.

      As opposed to these picturebooks, which have largely subsequently disappeared from use, Reverend W. Awdry published a longstanding best seller with The Three Railway Engines (1945), which was the first book of the famous Railway series, better known through the second volume, Thomas the Tank Engine (1946). The author created 23 volumes up to 1972. Launched as a TV series with the title Thomas & Friends on British children’s television in 1984 and continuously renewed through rebranding and transmedia extensions until the present, this picturebook series is an early example of a multimedia system complemented by merchandising products.

      The foundation of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) in 1946 and the official conferences and meetings activated by these institutions had a far-reaching impact on children’s literature in Europe and even beyond. In order to spread the ideals of tolerance, solidarity, and peace – as announced by the UNESCO charter – policymakers and practitioners demanded a new children’s literature that should particularly represent these ideas. One of the first picturebooks that targeted the issues of diplomacy and negotiations as a potential means of peacemaking was Erich Kästner’s Die Konferenz der Tiere (The Animals’ Conference, 1949), with illustrations by Walter Trier. Similar picturebook projects were realized in the ensuing years.

      The 1950s and 1960s as Trailblazers for New Trends in Picturebook Art

Although the prominence of retrospective tendencies in works of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s may suggest that this was a period of creative stasis, this evaluation does not hold true on closer consideration. To begin with, several prestigious picturebook awards were established in this time period: the Australian Children’s Book of the Year Award (est. 1952), paying attention to Australian illustrators, the Kate Greenaway Medal (est. 1956) as the most important illustrator’s award in the United Kingdom, and the German Jugendliteraturpreis (est. 1956), with a separate category for the best picturebook of the year – first awarded to Louis Fatio and Roger Duvoisin’s The Happy Lion (1955). Another steppingstone in the international promotion of children’s books and picturebooks was the founding of IBBY (International Board of Books for Young People) in Zurich in 1953, which established the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1956 as the highest international recognition for an author and illustrator of children’s literature. Among the winners of the annual prize for illustrators (given since 1966) are Mitsumasa Anno, Alois Carigiet, Klaus Ensikat, Svend Otto, Květa Pacovská, Maurice Sendak, and Tomi Ungerer.

      The conspicuous artistic and narrative development of the picturebook reverberated in international book fairs and activities devoted to the promotion of children’s book illustration. The Bologna Book Fair in Italy, established in 1963, is the biggest international trade exhibition for children’s literature. Every year the Bologna Ragazzi Award (divided into several categories) is given to the best illustrated picturebook. In 1967, the Biennial of Illustration Bratislava (BIB), Slovakia, was celebrated for the first time. Under the auspices of UNESCO and IBBY, this event presents the best in international children’s book illustration and gives artists from countries around the world the opportunity to present their work. During this meeting, a grand prize for unique illustration and the Golden Apple are awarded to outstanding artists. Both the Ragazzi Award and the BIB grand prize pay particular attention to gifted picturebook-makers from all over the world, including countries whose picturebook production is often unknown to an international book market.

      At the same time, UNESCO commissioned renowned photographers to create photographic picturebooks for children that depict children’s everyday lives in different countries all over the world, thus promoting the ideals of tolerance and mutual understanding. The most prominent series, with photos by Anna Riwkin-Brick, started in 1956 with Eva möter Noriko-San (Eva Meets Noriko-San), with a text written by Astrid Lindgren. Originally published in Swedish, the 15-volume series was an eminent success, with translations into more than 20 languages and a print run of 25,000 copies in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Ehriander 2011). Similar series followed suit, for instance, the My Village series (23 vols, 1956–1972) by the couple Sonia and Tim Gidal and Enfants du monde (Children of the World, 20 vols, 1952–1975) by French photographer Dominique Darbois (Lemarchant 2015).

      The period offered other inventive picturebooks as well. Miroslav Sasek’s popular city guides for children, written in a tongue-in-cheek manner and beginning with This Is Paris (1959; 18 titles until 1974), provided knowledge about people’s everyday lives as well as their architectural and cultural surroundings. In order to serve the increasing interest in international cultures and to foster the learning of foreign languages, Antonio Frasconi’s See and Say (1955) renewed the tradition of the multilingual primer as well as the technique of wood engraving. By the phonetic transcription of the words, this picturebook used a new linguistic methodology to facilitate the correct spelling of foreign words. Similarly, The Cat in the Hat (1957) by Dr. Seuss (aka Theodor Geisel) demonstrated that primary school readers could be entertaining, even if the story just consists of 223 words (Nel 2007).

While some picturebook-makers put emphasis on the renewal of traditional book genres, primarily emphasizing their educational value, others turned toward contemporary artistic styles or referred, like the postwar artists discussed above, to avant-garde currents, which they regarded as a stimulus for the child’s intrinsic creativity. An early trailblazer in that category was the picturebooks by Italian artist Bruno Munari, who continuously produced artworks that challenge the viewer due to their unusual combination of materials, artistic techniques, and stories, as in Nella nebbia di Milano (The Circus in the Mist, 1968; see Campagnaro 2017). Drawing on the old tradition of using picturebooks as playthings, Munari involved the child reader in the construction of the story. The creative activity of the young child is also captured in Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), which is distinguished by the story’s dreamlike atmosphere as well as the reduced cartoon-like style (Nel 2012).

      Along the same lines, Leo Lionni paved the way for the acceptance of abstract art in picturebooks. The characters in his picturebook Little Blue and Little Yellow (1957) consist merely of torn scraps of colored paper; however, Lionni successfully combined this abstract depiction with an emotional story, thus igniting the child’s imagination. The Swiss artist Warja Lavater went a step further, as she has retold popular fairy tales such as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood, 1965) by means of abstract forms, such as circles, triangles, rectangles, and rhombuses. Created as accordion books, which Lavater herself has defined as “folded stories,” these retellings demand the reader to co-construct the underlying story by attributing specific meanings to the abstract forms, which stand for characters and objects. While the picturebooks by Munari, Lionni, and Lavater had often been regarded as artworks on the threshold of artists’ books, other illustrators devoted their artwork to revive the often neglected genre of the baby book (often put on a level with board books and rag or cloth books).

      Picturebook artists had previously paid little attention to early concept books, especially those for children from the age of 12 months up to three years of age. This attitude gradually changed in the 1960s, when an increasing number of illustrators showed a deep interest in picturebooks for the young ones (Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2005). The most effective among these artists was the Dutch graphic designer Dick Bruna,

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