Crockett Johnson

Crockett Johnson is best known for the comic strip Barnaby (1942–1952) and the Harold series of books beginning with Harold and the Purple Crayon. He also created over a hundred paintings relating to mathematics and mathematical physics from 1965 until his death. Johnson grew up in Elmhurst, Queens, New York, and studied art at Cooper Union in 1924 and at New York University in 1925. He explained his choice of pseudonym as follows: "Crockett is my childhood nickname. My real name is David Johnson Leisk. Leisk was too hard to pronounce -- so -- I am now Crockett Johnson!" By the late 1920s, Johnson became an art editor at several McGraw-Hill trade publications. He began his cartooning career in 1934 by contributing to the Communist Party publication New Masses and then became the publication's art editor. He remained with the magazine until 1940 and embarked on a career drawing comic strips in a series in Collier's Magazine named "The Little Man with the Eyes". Johnson also collaborated on four children's books with his wife, Ruth Krauss. The books were: The Carrot Seed, How to Make an Earthquake, Is This You?, and The Happy Egg. Johnson also created a series of more than 100 mathematical paintings inspired by geometric principles and mathematicians. He painted layered geometric shapes in the paintings, based on classic mathematical theorems and diagrams in James Newman’s The World of Mathematics as well as other mathematics books, and later constructed his own inventions.