Hungarian-American modernist designer György Kepes’ contribution to postwar modernism will be the focus of György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science, a new documentary film by Márton Orosz.
In October 1941, Chicago’s Katharine Kuh Gallery assembled a significant exhibition on modern graphic design and its relationship with commerce. The exhibit The Advance Guard of Advertising Artists was developed alongside László Moholy-Nagy and Kepes; for the first time it brought together nine American and European progressives including Frank Barr, Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, Kepes (who designed the exhibition catalog), E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Matter, Moholy-Nagy, Paul Rand and Ladislav Sutnar.
Kepes was more than an artist, graphic designer and author, he was the link between science and visual matter. He taught at the New Bauhaus in 1943 and later at Brooklyn College, where his students included Saul Bass. “He changed my life,” Bass said. “He turned me around and I became a designer because of him. He opened the door for me that caused me to understand design and art in another way. He is a truly inspired teacher. It is rare that a man can be both an artist and a teacher, and perform superbly as both.”
Orosz’s film explores Kepes through questions that continue to vex designers and scientists today: Can technology save us from technology itself? Can prosthetics be used to emulate the pageantry of nature and provide a viable alternative for building a sustainable world? Orosz describes his subject as a man “with the scientist’s brain, the poet’s heart and the painter’s eye,” insisting that Kepes is a forgotten precursor of media art.
Kepes was among the first to use the term “visual culture” as an independent research subject in a contemporary sense. As the architect of the light workshop at the New Bauhaus/School of Design in Chicago in 1937 and the founder and first director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in 1967, his mission was to introduce powerful new tools to “intersee” and “interthink” knowledge on a participatory basis. It proved to be the foundation of a program that defined the aesthetic agency of the ecological consciousness long before these concepts were melded together, giving him a pioneering role in the history of the Art and Technology Movement.
The MIT premiere of the film begins at 7 p.m. on Oct. 21 in Cambridge.