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György Kepes
Gyorgy Kepes Green Purple Geometric Abstraction New Bauhaus Mid-century Modern

Name: Gyorgy Kepes Green & Purple Geometric Abstraction New Bauhaus Mid-century Modern
Brand: György Kepes
Rating: 5 (16 reviews)

$15,000List Price

About the Item

Gyorgy Kepes (1906 - 2001) Untitled Mixed media on canvas 48 x 48 inches Kepes was born in Selyp, Hungary. His younger brother was Imre Kepes, ambassador in Argentina, father of András Kepes, a journalist, documentary filmmaker and author. 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." 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 Arnheim'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 László 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. A fortunate consequence of moving to London was that Kepes found his future wife, a 17-year-old British woman née 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". In part, the book was important because it predated three other influential texts on the same subject: Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design (1946), László 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". 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). Some of the Center's early fellows included artists Otto Piene, Panayiotis Vassilakis, Jack Burnham, Wen-Ying Tsai, Stan Vanderbeek, Maryanne Amacher, Joan Brigham, Lowry Burgess, Peter Campus, Muriel Cooper, Douglas Davis, Susan Gamble, Dieter Jung, Piotr Kowalski, Charlotte Moorman, Antoni Muntadas, Yvonne Rainer, Keiko Prince, Alan Sonfist, Aldo Tambellini, Joe Davis, Bill Seaman, Tamiko Thiel, Alejandro Sina, Don Ritter, Luc Courchesne, and Bill Parker. 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, Maurice K Smith, 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). Kepes and his wife Juliet Appleby Kepes are memorialized at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA, where Kepes died in 2001. The markers are of wood and stone, respectively, and are tall and rectangular in proportion. The Friends of Mt. Auburn provide further information about the stones and their design by grandson Janos Stone. 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.

Creator:
György Kepes (1906 - 2001, Hungarian)
Dimensions:
Height: 49 in (124.46 cm)Width: 49 in (124.46 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Mixed Media
Movement Style:
Bauhaus
Period:
Mid-20th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU184129923992

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Henry Pfeiffer
Henri PFEIFFER (1907-1994), "Step of two", 1931

$3,559

H 16.54 in W 11.42 in

Bauhaus Moshe Raviv Moi Ver Abstract Oil Painting Lithuanian Israeli Modern

Located in Surfside, FL

Abstract, Figure of Woman, Safed Oil on Masonite. Signed. Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic, known as Moi Ver, born Moses Vorobeichik (1904–1995) was an Israeli photographer and painter. Moi Ver (Moshe Raviv) was born in 1904 in Vilnius, Lithuania as Moshe Vorobeichic. Moshe Vorobeichic received his initial artistic training in the early 1920s in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he studied painting, architecture, and photography. Having become an important figure in the Yiddish avant-garde culture, he exhibited his first works. From October 1927, he studied at the Bauhaus school in Dessau (Germany), with photographer-visual artist Laszlo Moholy Nagy and painters Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Hinnerk Scheper. In his book Moi Ver: Paris, he produced avant-garde photomontages. Originally published in 1931 by Editions Jeanne Walter with an introduction by futurist Fernand Leger. In 1932 Raviv was sent by the weekly La Vie Parisienne to British Mandate Palestine as photo reporter. Raviv illustrated many books. Raviv was a founder of the Artists' Colony in Safed. At the height of 20th Century modernism and one of the followers of Laszlo Moholy Nagy and his concept of New Vision, Moin Ver was one of the rising stars in European photography. Born in Lebedeva, in Belarus, he wandered through Europe until he immigrated to Palestine in 1934. His well known yet partly forgotten three photographic projects in 1931, The Ghetto Lane in Wilna, Paris: 80 Photographies de Moi Ver and Ci-Contre – 110 Photos de Moi Ver (that was not published at the time), have remained milestones in the art of the 1930s as he created and imposed a new visionary style in photography. As a contemporary of artists such as Man Ray, Ilse Bing...

Category

20th Century Bauhaus Abstract Paintings

Materials

Oil

Moi Ver (Moshe Raviv Vorobeichic)
Bauhaus Moshe Raviv Moi Ver Abstract Oil Painting Lithuanian Israeli Modern

$2,000

H 17.8 in W 16 in

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By Natalia Roman

Located in Barcelona, ES

These series of paintings by Natalia Roman gather their inspiration from geometric, minimalist shapes and paintings from the beginning of Modernism, with a special emphasis on Art De...

Category

2010s Bauhaus Abstract Paintings

Materials

Acrylic, Paper

Natalia Roman
Golden Beehive, Squared Painting, Abstract Geometric Grid, Yellow, Black, Red, 2023

$720

H 28 in W 28 in

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"Ouverture, with Cypress Forms" Stephen Edlich, Abstract Geometric Painting

By Stephen Edlich

Located in New York, NY

Stephen Edlich Ouverture, with Cypress Forms, 1982 Signed, dated and titled on the stretcher Acrylic paint, mixed media, and burlap on canvas 60 x 40 inches An artist who worked in the post-cubist and constructivist traditions, Stephen P. Edlich gained a considerable amount of acclaim in the 1970s and 1980s for his collages, sculpture, and paintings. His promising career was cut short due to his untimely death at age 45 in 1989. Edlich was born in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree with a major in fine arts studies from New York University in 1967. During his college years, he traveled to London, where he met the art dealer Victor Waddington and created his first white on white collage. In that same year, he attended a major exhibition of the work of Ben Nicholson, which would be influential source in his art. Edlich returned to England in 1967, where he met Barbara Hepworth and Patrick Heron in London and traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, long a favorite artists' haunt. Edlich began creating acrylic reliefs...

Category

1980s Abstract Geometric Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Burlap, Mixed Media, Acrylic

Stephen Edlich
"Ouverture, with Cypress Forms" Stephen Edlich, Abstract Geometric Painting, 1982

$60,000 Sale Price

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