BETWEEN WORLDS: The Autobiography of Leo Lionni.<i> By Leo Lionni</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 295 pp., $35</i> : THE GIRL WITH THE BROWN CRAYON.<i> By Vivian Gussin Paley</i> .<i> Harvard University Press: 99 pp., $18.95</i>

In the spring of 1959, Leo Lionni arrived at a watershed in his career. He had achieved great success in the field of graphic art. He had credits as designer of the Olivetti stores, of the Unfinished Business pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair and of Sports Illustrated. He was art director of Fortune and creator of Print magazines. In the middle of his journey, he decided to quit his jobs, sell his Greenwich, Conn., home, move to Italy and “give myself totally to the arts.” He was not unhappy in his work. And yet, he writes in “Between Worlds,” “I sensed that never again would I feel the joy that made me jump up and run to mother yelling, ‘Look what I made.’ ”

Lionni is an artist whose life has paralleled and intersected much of the social and artistic history of the 20th century. He was an only child born into a family of art and artists in Amsterdam in 1910. His mother was a talented opera singer; his father, a businessman with “impeccable taste.” Two uncles were serious art collectors, and a third, Uncle Piet, an architect, taught the very young Leo to draw. “For me, art was a generous world that included painting, sculpture, singing, piano playing, architecture.” Not to mention a Chagall in the hall, the terrariums he constructed at home, the casts he copied at the Ryksmuseum. From his earliest years, Leo “learned to see, and to remember what [he] saw.” In addition to a finely tuned eye, he had talent in many media. Fortunately for readers of his autobiography, one of them is words.

In 1922, the “sunny garden” of Lionni’s childhood disappeared when his parents immigrated to America. While they established themselves in a new life, Lionni stayed with his grandparents in Brussels, where he remembers himself living as a “polite observer.” Two years after her departure, his mother reappeared with an operatic cry of “Surprise, surprise” to reclaim her son. The next international stops for the Lionnis were Philadelphia and Genoa, where Lionni’s father headed Allied Chemical Corp. in Italy. There they lived in “L’appartamento ideale.”

“I was the son of an important foreign industrialist, I had reached an age that entitled me to opinions. . . . I had a beautiful room of my own with Renaissance furniture and a real German easel.” It was the perfect time to fall in love: with Italy, with new ideas and with the captivating Maffi family. Dr. Fabrizio Maffi, recently widowed, a distinguished physician and member of Parliament, was in jail for communist activity. His four lively offspring were on their own. Lionni was first drawn to his classmate, Adda Maffi, and then, even more intensely, to her sister Nora, whom he soon married. Their romance and young marriage unfolded against a backdrop of trouble in Europe: book burnings in the streets of Genoa, family members and friends questioned and arrested.

As the political storms intensified, Leo and Nora went to Switzerland for the birth of their second son. Realizing that Europe was no place for a half-Jewish artist, Lionni sailed for America in 1939. In the tradition of his parents and generations of immigrants before them, he would send for his family once he was settled. His design portfolio in hand, Lionni set about looking for work in New York. After the head of the “most important employment agency” in town told him bluntly, if unprophetically, “You will never get a job in America with this European kind of stuff,” he found success at the N. W. Ayer agency in Philadelphia. Nora and the children soon joined him.

Happily for the state of art and design in America, refugees like Lionni, artists from the Bauhaus and many other “hauses,” kept coming, bringing with them what he identifies as “the one ingredient European designers were always aiming for, the subtle imperfection that testifies to the presence of the shaping hand.” Gradually, during the late 1940s and ‘50s, this infusion of modernism and “Mediterranean vitality” changed the way everything from industrial products to the print media looked and was seen, realigning boundaries between fine and commercial art.

Lionni attributes his life-long conviction that “all human acts have social and political consequences” to his early exposure to Nazism. When, near the beginning of World War II, he was denied a position with the OSS because of leftist connections, he found it a bitter irony that his anti-fascist beliefs had kept him out of a war he so strongly felt was his. But what the U.S. government saw as radicalism was no problem for capitalist employers. Lionni was the valued art director of Fortune when Sen. Joseph McCarthy demanded that Time Inc. President Henry Luce fire “the notorious fellow traveler.” Luce’s response that Lionni’s politics were “his own private business” closed the case.

Perhaps Lionni’s willingness to accept, work with and even court change and make it into art was another result of growing up searching for stability in an unstable world. In the late 1970s at a foundry in Venice, a friend watching Lionni work on one of his botanical fantasies commented, “You always tell stories, don’t you?” as Lionni etched the marks of age into the surface of the bronze. Lionni agreed that story-telling was an essence of his style. The child who had been a “polite observer” had grown into an artist, turning observations into a very wide variety of stories.

One story became “a little miracle.” When he had to entertain his 3- and 5-year-old grandchildren on a train trip, grandpa the artist tore discs of color from the pages of Life and made the colors into characters in a short adventure. The children loved it. Even commuters applauded. Then friend and editor Fabio Coen took charge and “Little Blue and Little Yellow” was launched as the first of Lionni’s 28 distinguished children’s books. Its abstract graphics, a new step in picture book illustration, are the perfect visual and rhythmic partner for the clearly told narrative.

By 1963, with the publication of “Swimmy,” the first of three Caldecott Honor books, Lionni’s bookmaking had joined painting and sculpture as his central occupations. He compares his books with the terrariums he nurtured as a child and finds them identical in scale and subject matter. “My miniature worlds, whether enclosed in yesterday’s walls of glass or in today’s cardboard covers, are . . . orderly, predictable alternatives to a chaotic . . . terrifying universe.”

In his fables, Lionni speaks to children with meaningful simplicity, conveying his belief in “Art . . . as a useful activity.” Swimmy, a small black fish, acts as the eye for a school of frightened fish and teaches them courage. “Frederick,” a Caldecott-honored mouse, is a poet who stores rays of sun, colors and words in his head while his friends store grain against the coming winter because, it turns out, both are needed.

In “The Girl With the Brown Crayon,” kindergarten teacher and MacArthur fellow Vivian Gussin Paley describes her class’ close connection to Lionni’s books over the period of a year at the University of Chicago Lab School. Reeny, a remarkably perceptive and enthusiastic African American 5-year-old who even dreams of Leo Lionni, says of Frederick: “That brown mouse seem to be just like me! Because I’m always usually thinking ‘bout color and words the same like him.” And like Lionni, who has shaped color and words into a well-designed autobiography.

There are, in Lionni’s “Between Worlds,” 50 short chapters punctuated with old photographs and a 24-page color retrospective of Lionni’s paintings, sculpture, commercial design, a few fine photographs and a collage of mice. The author’s voice, like his art, has a wide range. He is a private person who is not interested in embarrassing either himself or anyone else. He writes gentlemanly, almost perfunctory, recollections, giving friends and associates their due. He is also thoughtful, honest and witty; once or twice, he is heart-breaking. He has marvelous sensory recall about his early life, beginning with a description of himself at 4 “sitting alone in a small wicker chair in the center of a long, rectangular, freshly mowed meadow. It is late afternoon and the immense golden sky is slowly darkening. . . . Earlier, a skyful of red, white and blue balloons had slowly risen from the horizon into nothingness. I am waiting for the fireworks.”

He concludes 295 pages and 83 years later with another self-portrait: the artist in his studio in Porcinango, Italy, aged by years and Parkinson’s disease but still absorbed in “making things.” He has just shown his assistant how to “tear mouse bodies and cut mouse ears,” tails and legs, which she enjoys so much that he can see himself returning to New York with a briefcase chock-full of enough mouse parts for five or six new books. He wonders, “What will Customs say?”

How about a chorus of bravos? And then the fireworks.