Gyorgy Kepes: undreaming the Bauhaus

Abstract

Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2001) was the last disciple of Bauhaus modernism, an acolyte of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and a self-styled revolutionary artist. But by midcentury, transplanted to America, Kepes found he was trapped in the military-industrial-aesthetic complex. In this first book-length study of Kepes, John Blakinger argues that Kepes, by opening the research laboratory to the arts, established a new paradigm for creative practice: the artist as technocrat. First at Chicago's New Bauhaus and then for many years at MIT, Kepes pioneered interdisciplinary collaboration between the arts and sciences-what he termed "interthinking" and "interseeing." Kepes and his colleagues-ranging from metallurgists to mathematicians-became part of an important but little-explored constellation: the Cold War avant-garde.

Contents

Preface: portraits of the artist -- Introduction: from the ivory tower to the control tower -- Camouflage aesthetics -- Patterns and puzzles -- Vision as value -- Darkness into light -- The military-industrial-aesthetic complex -- Artificial natures -- Epilogue: afterimages.