LANGUAGE OF VISION
György Kepes
György Kepes: LANGUAGE OF VISION. Chicago: Paul Theobold and Co., 1948. Fifth printing. Quarto. Black cloth decorated in silver. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 228 pp. 318 black and white (and a few color) images. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Book design and typography by the author. Textblock top edge dust spotted and a bit of foxing early and late. Bright jacket with the red color sunned to spine [as usual], a lightly chipped spine crown, and a couple of short closed tears. An exceptionally nice copy— very good to nearly fine in a matching dust jacket.
8.75 x 11.25 book, with 228 pages and 318 b/w (and 3 color) images. Kepes was invited to join the faculty of the the New Bauhaus and to head a curricular area in Light and Color. 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" (p. 13). 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" (p. 45).
From S. Giedion's introduction: "This book, written by a young artist, bears witness that a third generation is on the march, willing to continue and to make secure the modern tradition which has developed in the course of this century; or, as Gyorgy Kepes states it: To put earlier demands into concrete terms and on a still wider social plane."
Step by step, Kepes follows the liberation of the plastic elements: lines, planes, and colors, and the creation of a world of forms of our own. The spatial conception interconnects the meaning fragments and binds them together just as in another period perspective did when it used a single station point for naturalistic representation."
- Art Means Reality by S. Giedion
- The Revision Of Vision by S. I. Hayakawa
- The Language Of Vision by György Kepes
- Plastic Organization
- Visual Representation
- Towards A Dynamic Iconography
This book includes work by the following artists [this list reads like a veritable whos-who of the modern movement]: Paul Rand (many examples), El Lissitzky, Lester Beall, Piet Mondrian, Jan Tschichold, Theo Van Doesburg, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Ladislav Sutnar, Will Burtin, Amadee Ozenfant, A. M. Cassandre, E. McKnight Kauffer, Le Courbusier, Fernand Leger, Morton Goldsholl, Jean Carlu, Joseph Binder, Alexandr Rodchenko, Man Ray, Herbert Matter, Kurt Schwitters, Alexey Brodovitch, Adeline Cross, H. L. Carpenter, Ruth Ribbons, Harold Walter, Kasimir Malevitch, Jean Helion, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Carlotta Corpron, Clifford Eitel ,Jack Waldheim, Frank Barr, Jere Donovan, Herbert Bayer, James Brown, Goerge Morris, Juan Gris, M. Martin Johnson, Taylor Poore, Frank Levstik, Nathan Lerner, Walter Peterhans, Henry Kann, Bereneice Abbott, György Kepes, E. G. Lukacs, Lee King, Harold Edgarton, Jospeh Fher, Elsa Kula Pratt and many other significant modernists.
Bauhaus contributors include Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Xanti Schawinsky, Walter Peterhans and Paul Klee.
György Kepes (Hungary, 1906 – 2001) was educated at the Budapest Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Kepes worked with fellow Hungarian Lazslo Moholy-Nagy first in Berlin and then in London before emigrating to the US in 1937. From 1930 to 1937 he worked off and on with Moholy-Nagy and through him, first in Berlin and then in London, met Walter Gropius and the science writer J. J. Crowther. In 1937, he was invited by Moholy to run the Color and Light Department at the New Bauhaus and later at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he taught until 1943. In 1944 he wrote his landmark book Language of Vision. This text was influential in articulating the Bauhaus principles as well as the Gestalt theories.
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 (c. 1968). Some of the Center's early fellows included artists Otto Piene, Vassilakis Takis, 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).
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.