György Kepes Hungarian, 1906-2001

György Kepes (1906–2001) was a painter, photographer, designer, and teacher whose subject was vision itself. His influence extends through American art education as much as through the images he made. His photograms and camera-less experiments belong to a lineage extending from the Bauhaus, but his 1944 book, Language of Vision, accomplished something no photograph could. It articulated a grammar of seeing, arguing that visual communication is universal, unbounded by language or vocabulary. The book became a standard text in art schools for a generation.

Born in Selyp, Hungary, in 1906, Kepes studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 1930, he moved to Berlin to work with his countryman László Moholy-Nagy. Between 1930 and 1936, he worked in Berlin and London on film, stage, and exhibition design. When Moholy-Nagy was invited to Chicago in 1937 to direct the New Bauhaus, he brought Kepes with him to head the department of light and color. Together, they transplanted Bauhaus pedagogy to the American Midwest.

In 1946, Kepes joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught visual design until 1974. In 1967, he founded MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, a fellowship program designed to bring artists into collaboration with architects, engineers, scientists, and city planners on questions concerning the built environment. He directed the Center until 1972 and edited the seven volumes of the Vision + Value series throughout the 1960s. Language of Vision had brought Bauhaus teaching into dialogue with Gestalt psychology and the science of perception. The New Landscape in Art and Science, published in 1956, extended this inquiry to the images emerging from scientific research: the micrograph, the spectrogram, and the aerial survey. Kepes regarded these as integral to modern visual culture, as consequential in their own way as anything hanging in a gallery. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies gave institutional form to this conviction, bringing its fellows to work with light, water, air, and the fabric of the city rather than concentrating on objects intended for exhibition.

Throughout his career, Kepes continued to paint and photograph. The photograms he had begun making in Berlin in the early 1930s remained a part of his practice into his final decades. His intellectual legacy traces a remarkably direct line from the Bauhaus through Moholy-Nagy to Chicago, and from Kepes into American design education, where his once-radical propositions about visual communication and perception have become so thoroughly absorbed that they are now largely taken for granted. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2001.

Kepes’s work was included in Discoveries (2010) at Bruce Silverstein Gallery.