Eric Carle's renowned collage art receives its due at the Tacoma Art Museum

It was nearly closing time when the grandfatherly figure in tweed jacket and baseball cap stepped into the gallery, his uncertainty suggesting a tourist who had lost his way.

This was Eric Carle, the great man himself, looking surprisingly small and vulnerable inside the echoing, high-ceilinged chamber at the Tacoma Art Museum.

He stood for a moment and swept his gaze over nearly 50 framed collages symbolizing a lifetime of work. His work.

Then he chuckled and moved on.

"I've seen it all before," said Carle, creator of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," "The Very Busy Spider" and more than 70 other beloved picture books for the very young.

Carle had just arrived from the East Coast to celebrate the Tacoma museum's special exhibit, "The Art of Eric Carle," which runs through Jan. 21.

The show, on loan from the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., displays some of the original artwork that millions of preschoolers and their parents know only from the printed page.

"It all looks different on the wall," Carle mused. "Especially when you first finish a book, you think, 'Is it any good?' Then you see it on the wall a few years later and it's not yours anymore. And you think, 'Hmm, it's pretty good!' "

In fact, the printed page doesn't quite capture the textural quality of Carle's hand-painted, tissue-paper collages. To see them firsthand -- bold, crayon-bright images in a sea of white space -- is to see them anew.

"I started out as a poster artist in Germany, and I've always liked the simplicity of poster art. It's very direct," Carle said.

His gentle voice still bears traces of a German boyhood. His unwavering, shoe-button eyes gave him the look of a serious, kindly koala as he settled onto a bench near the display.

Carle was a freelance advertising artist many years ago when one of his illustrations -- a lobster done in collage style -- caught the eye of Bill Martin Jr., an educator who wrote and edited picture books. Martin had a new manuscript, and he wanted Carle to do the pictures. Carle said yes -- and never looked back.

Published in 1967, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" remains a classic of early childhood.

"I wasn't terribly interested in picture books (until Martin's invitation)," Carle said, "but that did turn me around."

Martin, by the way, is the same writer who nudged Mercer Island's Ted Rand out of commercial art and into picture books, leading Rand into a long and hugely prolific second career that continued until his death last year.

Coming full circle, Carle has just completed a new book -- "Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?" -- to mark his 40th anniversary in picture books. It's due in stores next year.

Apart from their striking visual design, Carle's books are known for simple, entertaining stories subtly laced with learning.

"If you think about it," said Motoko Inoue, Carle's personal assistant, "there are concepts that are buried within the books -- days of the week, colors, numbers, night and day, directions, all sorts of things like that. But there's always story, and then there's something else."

Picture books provide an ideal palette for Carle, who seems to effortlessly channel his own early childhood, creating books that speak to the very young.

"He's like a 6-year-old trapped in a 77-year-old body," joked Nora Maroulis, marketing director at the Carle Museum.

Just as a small child experiences a book through all the senses -- chewing on it, patting it -- Carle likes to add elements that blur the line between book and toy.

His most famous tale, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" (originally conceived as "Willy the Worm"), has die-cut holes in the pages, as if the green-and-red larva ate right through the book on its way to becoming a sleek butterfly.

"The Very Lonely Firefly" ends with a display of flashing lights in a night sky, and "The Very Quiet Cricket" has a chirping sound chip.

All of which would be mere gimmicks in lesser hands. But children respond instinctively to Carle's rhythmic text and jewel-toned collages, his tales of busy spiders and grouchy ladybugs, of polar bears and little rubber ducks awash in the sea.

As one wistful fan wrote, "I would very much like to visit you, but I'm not allowed to cross the street."

Carle gets his love of nature from his father, who took him on forest walks in which they'd peek behind tree bark and under rocks to explore the hidden world of insects. If Carle envies any creature, it's the butterfly, which perceives a wider color spectrum than humans.

"I'm kind of frustrated that I cannot be more colorful," Carle said.

He traces his hunger for color to his boyhood in wartime Germany, in a cloudy city made drab by buildings cloaked in gray and green camouflage paint.

Carle was 6 in 1935, when his immigrant parents left Syracuse, N.Y., and returned to Stuttgart, Germany, lured by his mother's homesickness and a grandmother's tales of prosperity and good times under Hitler. It was a disastrous move.

Initially, young Eric's biggest grief was the loss of his American school, with its big, airy first-grade classroom and kindly Miss Frickey, who encouraged him to explore with paint and big, fat brushes.

In Germany, he said, "The school I went to had small rooms and small windows and small paper and hard pencils." And a bamboo switch that cut into small, upturned palms.

Larger problems loomed. Once World War II broke out, Stuttgart became a major target of Allied bombing. Carle's father was swallowed up by the army and reported wounded near Stalingrad. He returned home after eight years -- a broken prisoner of war who weighed 80 pounds.

Young Eric's life had one bright spot -- the occasional art lesson with a teacher named Herr Krauss. One day Krauss invited him home and, at great personal risk, brought out a secret box.

Inside were copies of forbidden art by "degenerates" like Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky -- this at a time when Hitler demanded naturalistic, patriotic art with "flag-waving Aryans," as Carle puts it.

"He told me I shouldn't say (anything) about it, but should remember this," said Carle, who recalls being shocked by the images' strange beauty -- the green faces, the eyes askew.

His picture books reflect that sense of freedom, but he says his young audience also demands a certain literal-mindedness.

"At certain stages -- (ages) 2, 3, 4, -- it has to be four legs on an animal, it has to be two eyes," Carle said. "But I don't do it for children. It's because I like to do it that way. All creative people, let's face it, are self-centered; they write music for themselves, they write books for themselves, they do picture books for themselves, mainly."

For all his many books, his most enduring remains 1969's "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," a fanciful journey of metamorphosis.

"My editor, my friends, my family, we all have talked about it," Carle said, puzzling over the tale's remarkable staying power.

"I think it's a book of hope," he concluded. " 'You, little, insignificant caterpillar or child or baby, can grow up and spread your wings and try your talent and fly all over the world.' I wonder if that's it."

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