THE NEW LANDSCAPE IN ART AND SCIENCE
György Kepes et al.
Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co., 1956. First edition. Quarto. Debossed brown cloth decorated in silver. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 383 pp. “452 illustrations, some in color”— dust jacket. Essays and bibliographical references. Former owners signature to front free endpaper and bookplate to front pastedown. Lightly rubbed jacket with mild edgewear including mild chipping to upper and lower edges. Book design and typography by György Kepes. A very good or better copy in a very good dust jacket.
8.75 x 11.25-inch hardocver book with 383 pages and 452 illustrations (some in color) illustrating essays collected and edited by Gyorgy Kepes. “The New Landscape” served as a direct precursor to his Vision and Value Series, where Kepes carried on the pedagogical tradition of fusing art and science that his mentor Moholy-Nagy pioneered at the Bauhaus and in Chicago at the Institute of Design, thus taking the torch first lit by Moholy-Nagy and Gropius in their Bauhausbücher series.
Contents:
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword / John E. Burchard
- Preface
- Introduction
- I. Art and science
- II. Image, form, symbol
- Art and science / Naum Gabo
- Domesticating the invisible / S.I. Hayakawa
- The esthetic motivation of science / Bruno Rossi
- III. The industrial landscape
- Inner and outer landscape / Richard J. Neutra
- Poetry and landscape / Richard Wilbur
- The new landscape / Fernand Leger
- Notes / Jean Helion
- Universalism and the enlargement of outlook / S. Giedion
- Reorientation / Walter Gropius
- Man-cosmos symbols / Charles Morris
- IV. The new landscape
- Magnification of optical data
- Expansion and compression of events in time
- Expansion of the eye's sensitivity range
- Modulation of signals
- V. Thing, structure, pattern, process
- VI. Transformation
- Transformation / Jean Arp
- VII. Analogue, metaphor
- Pure patterns in a natural world / Norbert Wiener
- Design and function in the living / R.W. Gerard
- On physiognomic perception / Heinz Werner
- VIII. Morphology in art and science
- IX. Symmetry, proportion, module
- Organic design / C.F. Pantin
- Art in crystallography / Kathleen Lonsdale
- Form in engineering / Paul Weidlinger
- X. Continuity, discontinuity, rhythm, scale
- Contributors biographies
- Name index
Includes work by Josef Albers, Hans Arp, Sophie Tauber Arp, Herbert Bayer, Harry Bertoia, Max Bill, William Blake, Umberto Boccioni, Sandro Boticelli, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Eduardo Catalano, Paul Cezanne, John Constable, Eugene Delacroix, Robert Delauney, Theo Van Doesburg, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Durer, Charles Eames, Viking Eggeling, Buckminster Fuller, Naum Gabo, Juan Gris, Mathis Gruünewald, Hans Hartung, Stanly Hayter, William Hogarth, Wassily Kandinsky, Gyorgy Kepes, Irme Kepes, Johannes Kepler, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Frank Kupka, Le Corbusier, Fernand Leger, El Lissitzky, John Marin, Andre Masson, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, Richard Neutra, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, Louis Sullivan, Eduardo Torroja, Mies van der Rohe, Henry van der Velde, Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Vantongerloo, Jacques Villon, Konrad Wachsman, Edward Weston, and many others.
György Kepes (Hungarian, 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. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1974 and in 1967 he established the Center for Advanced Studies. During his career he also designed for the Container Corporation of America and Fortune magazine as well as Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown.
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.