Eric Carle's Modern Art Inspirations Featured in New Display

A new exhibition at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art opening tomorrow examines the movements and artists that shaped Carle’s distinctive visual language.

On view through September 5, 2027 at the museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, Eric Carle’s Modernist Inspirations traces his formative years in Germany when his high school art teacher secretly introduced him to the work of so-called “degenerate” artists banned by the regime, making a lasting impression on Carle’s own work.

The exhibition highlights his admiration for the Bauhaus school and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, presenting selections from his oeuvre in dialogue with works by modernist figures such as Anni Albers, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Fujimori Shizuo, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, August Macke, René Magritte, Franz Marc, and Pablo Picasso, all on loan from area museums. Carle dedicated many picture books to the artists that inspired him such as Léger, Marc, and Magritte. The exhibition will feature more than 60 works in two rotations, the first from September 19, 2026 until February 28, 2027, and the second from March 6, 2027 to September 5, 2027.
 
Exhibition highlights include:

• a color lithograph Girl at the Window (Mädchen am Fenster, 1906) by Viennese artist Oskar Kokoschka which mimics stained-glass in Viennese churches and whose early work referenced medieval stories and woodblock prints; in the 1970s, Carle illustrated a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, carving linoleum blocks to depict the German fairytale to make prints with a distinctly medieval feel
• Paul Klee’s watercolor Äliup, 1931, which features a background of intense, repetitive brushstrokes, overlaid with dark dashes and outlined shapes recalling musical notations - this is juxtaposed with Carle’s abstract illustration for Animals Animals by Laura Whipple (1989)
• French Cubist painter Fernand Léger’s lithograph Les Constructeurs (ca. 1950-1953), part of a series created to celebrate the modern construction worker involved in rebuilding France after World War II, and an illustration from Carle’s My Apron, with dark Léger-style outlines on his characteristic tissue paper collages