Gyorgy Kepes

Hungarian-born painter, designer, and theorist of visual perception (1906–2001), longtime MIT professor and founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Kepes trained as a painter in Budapest and worked alongside László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin and London before following him to Chicago, where he headed the Light and Color department at the New Bauhaus. In 1946 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching visual design and eventually founding the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1967. His influential Language of Vision (1944) and the Vision + Value book series pursued a lifelong project of integrating art, science, and technology into a shared vocabulary of form.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. Kepes edited Structure in Art and in Science (1965), a volume in his Vision + Value series that gathered artists and scientists around the theme of structure; R. Buckminster Fuller contributed the essay "Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures." As an MIT colleague and fellow theorist committed to fusing art and science, Kepes moved in the same design-education world that shaped Fuller — the Bauhaus lineage carried to America by László Moholy-Nagy, on whose New Bauhaus faculty both men had ties. Their shared conviction that structure and pattern underlie both natural form and human design placed them in close intellectual company.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure; contributor to Kepes's Structure in Art and in Science
• László Moholy-Nagy (László Moholy-Nagy) — Bauhaus master and mentor under whom Kepes taught at the New Bauhaus

Sources

• Structure in art and in science (source reference) — 1965 volume edited by Kepes, with Fuller's essay "Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures"