Warja Lavater (1913-2007) was born in Winterthur, Switzerland. She spent her childhood in Russia, Greece, and Switzerland, and studied art initially at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich, then subsequently in Sweden and Paris. Impressed by the expressive potential of signs and advertising boards on American streets, toward the end of the 1950s she developed the use of pictograms as a form of pictorial language. She became famous for her paintings, drawings, and graphic work, which included pictograms and folding books for children and adults.
