LANGUAGE OF VISION
Gyorgy Kepes

Gyorgy Kepes: LANGUAGE OF VISION. Chicago: Theobold, 1944. Thirteenth printing. A fine hardcover book with silver-stamped boards with a fine dust jacket: trivial wear to edges.The condition, along with the presence of the uncommon Kepes-designed Dust jacket makes this an unusually nice edition. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Book design and typography by the author.

8.75 x 11.25 book, with 228 pages and 318 b/w (and a few color) images. Kepes was one of Moholy-Nagy's assistants at the New Bauhaus in Chicago (Institute of Design). This book is Kepes' articulations of his teaching theories.

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."

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, Gyorgy 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, and Paul Klee.

Contents :

  • art means reality by S. Giedion
  • the revision of vision by S. I. Hayakawa
  • the language of vision by Gyorgy Kepes
  • plastic organization
  • visual representation
  • towards a dynamic iconography

György Kepes 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.

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