In Memoriam: Gyorgy Kepes, 1906-2002

Gyorgy Kepes lived for almost a century. His artistic, visionary thinking spanned and at times dominated much of the spirit and intellect of the integrative arts for over two-thirds of the 20th century. His suggestions and projections remain alive and forceful at the onset of the new millennium.

His work—photos, paintings, books, teaching, design, environmental and architectural realizations—carries a glow of the creative power of his ideas, which cohered into an image of the new world in which we are beginning to live. His command of visual imagery and linguistic metaphor was altogether poetic and lent irresistible persuasiveness to his lifelong discourse and resulting imperatives regarding the conflict between the world into which the human race was born to create and the world it created.

The mission he pursued with an intensity bordering on fanaticism declared: Humans are born to be whole, born to use all their gifts and facilities to build a life of union with nature through art, science, technology, industry and continued labor toward harmony and order—yes, order, a recurring word in his writings. The human "inner compass" guides a formation of constructed and lived order that reflects our innate order.

Facing the epic chaos, catastrophes, crimes and threats of World War I, World War II and the nuclear age, it took moral resolve commensurate with the spirit of the United Nations to fight for a modern world in balance. Gyorgy Kepes's arms and armor were teaching and setting examples of corresponding harmonies—such as exhibitions and built environments—that quoted scientific, natural and artistic beauty in dialog. An ever-growing audience listened and acted: artists, the academic world, public officials and citizens. The unifying ferment among his audience has been the appeal to the basic creative momentum in all humans. Kepes's predominant medium was light, as in Light as a Creative Medium, the title of a show he designed in 1966 for the Harvard University Carpenter Center.

The Harvard exhibition occurred almost 30 years after Kepes's arrival in the United States in 1937 to head the Light Department at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, at the invitation of its director, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In Chicago, Kepes became a doubly international force: On the one hand he carried European, e.g. Bauhaus, traditions into the all-powerful Americas, and on the other hand American industrial, urban and intellectual might swept his tempting vision "across the time"—in contrast to the beginnings of the "post-Bauhaus" Bauhaus school, then falling into utter poverty.

Colleague-friends were there, too—a historically ironic European cultural conquest in the United States while America was inflicting terminal defeat on Germany et al. Over many years immigrants like the Hungarian Kepes—Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Breuer, Hoffmann, Archipenko, Albers, Arnheim—preserved the central European momentum toward renewal by transplanting it in the New World.

A seemingly teleological further cultural shift moved Kepes with his admirably dedicated English-born wife, Juliet, to the core territory of American innovation in science, humanities and technology: MIT and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1946. Here he structured his art, science and light vision into a complex but transparent organism of ideas and suggestions. Here he taught a generation of young architects and here he befriended a succession of MIT presidents, some of whom, e.g. James Killian and Jerome Wiesner, were science advisors to U.S. presidents.

One of Kepes's strongest arguments advocated what is now called "public art" ("Art in Civic Scale," as was titled a Kepes-inspired MIT symposium in May 1971). Its appeal is social, communal; it implies a large audience, as does media art, which was also then emerging. Its means are therefore complex, often complicated, and thus require teams, collaboration, in a practical rationalization of Kepes's vision: "All facilities and human facilities together."

Social arts, art as a method of thinking, art as research where scientific research attends to art and the fields feed back upon each other—MIT carried much promise then as an ivory tower and as a playing field for collaboration and participation...