Gyorgy kepes mit

György kepes art
Gyorgy kepes: undreaming the bauhaus
Gyorgy kepes pronunciation

•

György Kepes

György and Juliet Kepes
Born	October 4, 1906(1906-10-04) Selyp, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary)
Died	December 29, 2001(2001-12-29) (aged 95) Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Web	Wikipedia, Academia.edu, Open Library

Self-portrait, 1931. Gelatin silver print, c1937-40, 7.62 x 6.35 cm.

Lights, 1938. Gelatin silver print.

Simulated effects of a proposed mile-long programmed luminous wall, suggested for the Boston Harbor Bicentennial, 1964-65.

Untitled #144. Vintage gelatin silver print, 21.6 x 16.5 cm, printed c1970.

György Kepes (1906–2001) 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.

Life and work

This section is sourced from Marga Bijvoet, Art as Inq

•

MIT Compton Lectures

György Kepes (1906–2001) was a Hungarian-born painter, designer, educator, and art theorist. At age 18, Kepes 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 movement.

In 1930, Kepes 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 Amheim’s 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 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian photographer who had taught at the Dessau Bauhas. When, in 1936, Moholy relocated his design studio to London, Kepes joined him there as well.

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. While teaching at the Institute of Design from

•

Kepes went on to teach without Smith in the successor of the New Bauhaus, the School of Design, which opened in 1939. At the regular and evening classes, the Light and Advertising Workshop, where “a thorough re-evaluation is made of the elements of visual expression,”³¹ he was helped by several assistants: Frank Levstik, and two students, Leonard Niederkorn and Nathan Lerner.³² Beside the vividly imaginative photograms, which he devised from the most diverse materials, Kepes conducted important light experiments, which employed the distorting and reflexive effects of prisms, concave and convex lenses and glass pieces, and easy-to-mould polished metal surfaces. With a signature move, he forced the lyrically abstract, amorphous shapes into a balanced order by combining them with geometric forms. “The phenomenon of light is capable of an apparent spontaneity which is difficult, if not impossible, for the manual artist to achieve,” he wrote on the back of a piece made at the time.³³ It followed from the nature of light that the form was not the only thing to appear in Kepes’s