Gyrgy Kepes

Gyrgy Kepes
Gyrgy Kepes (October 4, 1906 December 29, 2001) was a Hungarian-born painter, designer, educator and art
theorist. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he taught design at the New Bauhaus (later the School of Design, then
Institute of Design, then Illinois Institute of Design or IIT) in Chicago. In 1967 He founded the Center for Advanced
Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught until his retirement in 1974.

Early years
Kepes was born in Selyp, Hungary. At age 18, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he
studied for four years with Istvan Csok, a Hungarian impressionist painter. In the same period, he was also
influenced by the socialist avant-garde poet and painter Lajos Kassak, and began to search for means by which he
could contribute to the alleviation of social injustice, especially (as he later recalled) the inhumane conditions of the
Hungarian peasantry.

Berlin and London

Kepes gave up painting temporarily and turned instead to filmmaking. In 1930, he settled in Berlin, where he worked
as a publication, exhibition and stage designer. Around this time, he designed the dust jacket for Gestalt psychologist
Rudolf Arnheims famous book, Film als Kunst (Film as Art), one of the first published books on film theory. In
Berlin, he was also invited to join the design studio of Lszl Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian photographer who had
taught at the Dessau Bauhaus. When, in 1936, Moholy relocated his design studio to London, Kepes joined him there
as well.

New Bauhaus
A fortunate consequence of moving to London was that Kepes found his future wife, a 17-year-old British woman
ne Juliet Appleby, an artist and illustrator. By chance, he saw her on the street, introduced himself, and soon the two
began to date. The following year, when Moholy agreed to become the director of a new art school in Chicago
(which Moholy dubbed the New Bauhaus), Kepes was invited to join the faculty and to head a curricular area in
Light and Color. Kepes asked Juliet to join him. While teaching at the Institute of Design (or New Bauhaus) from
1937 to 1943, Kepes enlarged and refined his ideas about design theory, form in relation to function, and (his own
term) the education of vision. Kepes was lured to Brooklyn College by Russian-born architect Serge Chermayeff,
who had been appointed chair of the Art Department in 1942. There he taught graphic artists such as Saul Bass.
In 1944, he published Language of Vision, an influential book about design and design education. Widely used for
many years as a college textbook (it had thirteen printings, in four languages), it began by acknowledging Kepes
indebtedness to the Berlin-based Gestalt psychologists, and by asserting that Visual communication is universal and
international; it knows no limits of tongue, vocabulary, or grammar, and it can be perceived by the illiterate as well
as by the literate[The visual arts, as] the optimum forms of the language of vision, are, therefore, an invaluable
educational medium (p.13). In part, the book was important because it predated three other influential texts on the
same subject: Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design (1946), Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (1947), and Rudolf
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (1954).
In 1942, Kepes had been one of a number of people (Moholy was another) who were asked by the U.S. Army to
offer advice on military and civilian urban camouflage, in the course of which he viewed Chicago from the air. He
alluded to this experience in Language of Vision, when he talked about natural camouflage: The numerous optical
devices which nature employs in the animal world to conceal animals from their enemies reveal the workings of this
law [i.e., perceptual grouping] of visual organization (p.45).

Gyrgy Kepes

Years at MIT
In 1947, Kepes accepted an invitation from the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT to initiate a program
there in visual design, a division that later became the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (c1968).
While teaching at MIT (where he remained until his retirement in 1974), Kepes was in contact with a wide
assortment of artists, designers, architects and scientists, among them Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, Rudolf
Arnheim, Marcel Breuer, Charles Eames, Erik Erikson, Walter Gropius and Jerome Wiesner. His own art having
moved toward abstract painting, he developed a parallel interest in new scientific imagery, in part because it too had
grown increasing abstract. In 1956, what began as an exhibition became a highly unusual book, The New
Landscape in Art and Science, in which Modern-era artwork was paired with scientific images that were made, not
with the unaided eye, but with such then high tech devices as x-ray machines, stroboscopic photography, electron
microscopes, sonar, radar, high-powered telescopes, infrared sensors and so on. His theories on visual perception
and, particularly, his personal mentorship, had a profound influence on young MIT architecture, planning, and visual
art students. These include Kevin Lynch (The Image of the City) and Maurice K Smith (Associative Form and Field
theory).

Vision + Value
In 1965-66, Kepes edited a set of six anthologies, published as a series called the Vision + Value Series. Each
volume contained more than 200 pages of essays by some of the most prominent artists, designers, architects and
scientists of the time. The richness of the volumes is reflected in their titles: The Education of Vision; Structure in
Art and Science; The Nature and Art of Motion; Module, Symmetry, Proportion, Rhythm; Sign, Image, Symbol; and
The Man-Made Object.
In his lifetime, Kepes produced other books of lasting importance, among them Graphic Forms: Art as Related to
the Book (1949); Arts of Environment (1972); and The Visual Arts Today (1960). He was also a prolific painter and
photographer, and his work is in major collections. In recognition of his achievements, there is a Kepes Visual
Centre in Eger, Hungary. In 1973 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and
became a full Academician in 1978.

Writings
Language of Vision. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944. Reissued: New York: Dover Publications, 1995. ISBN
0-486-28650-9.
Graphic Forms: The Arts as Related to the Book. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1949.
The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956.
Vision + Value Series, including The Education of Vision. Structure in Art and Science. The Nature and Art of
Motion. Module, Symmetry, Proportion, Rhythm. Sign, Image, Symbol. The Man-Made Object. New York:
George Braziller, 1965-66.
The Visual Arts Today. Wesleyan University Press, 1966.
The Lost Pageantry of Nature. Artscanada, pages 3339, Dec 1968.
Arts of Environment. New York: George Braziller, 1972.
Gyrgy Kepes: The MIT Years 1945-77. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1978.
Gyrgy Kepes, Lucian Bernard, and Ivan Chermayeff. The 60th Art Directors Annual. New York: ADC
Publications, 1981

Gyrgy Kepes

Further reading
Gyrgy Kepes in Ann Lee Morgan, ed., Contemporary Designers. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1984.
Gyrgy Kepes in Roy R. Behrens, CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and
Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9713244-6-6.

External links

"Gyrgy Kepes, founder of CAVS, dies at 95" [1]

"Gyrgy Kepes: Exemplar of the Visual Arts" [2]
Gyrgy Kepes as a contributor to PM magazine. [3]
Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work [4]
The Gyrgy Kepes Fellowship for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research in Art, Culture, and
Technology [5]

References
[1] http:/ / web. mit. edu/ newsoffice/ 2002/ kepes. html
[2] http:/ / www. harvardsquarelibrary. org/ unitarians/ kepes. html
[3] http:/ / www. drleslie. com/ Contributors/ kepes. shtml
[4] http:/ / www. adcglobal. org/ archive/ hof/ 1981/ ?id=258
[5] http:/ / www. erstestiftung. org/ project/
the-gyorgy-kepes-fellowship-for-advanced-studies-and-transdisciplinary-research-in-art-culture-and-technology/

Article Sources and Contributors

Article Sources and Contributors

Gyrgy Kepes Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=590829486 Contributors: Bearcat, Blauhaus, Dadge, Doktorscholl, Freshacconci, Gbsencyc, GearedBull, Goldenrowley,
Grafen, GrahamHardy, John Q. Architext, Lockley, Madcoverboy, Mandarax, No3mie, Nonza, Pegship, Robkesseler, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Tassedethe, Theoh, Waacstats, 8 anonymous edits

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