KEPES, GYORGY

born Oct. 4, 1906, Selyp, Hung. Hungarian-born American painter, designer, photographer, teacher, and writer, who had considerable influence in many areas of design, particularly through his contributions to the understanding of light and colour. Shortly after his graduation from the Royal Academy of Fine Art, Budapest (1928), Kepes experimented with photograms (photographic prints made by placing objects on sensitized paper and exposing the paper to light) and later made prints he called photo-drawings, in which paint was applied to a glass plate that was printed as though it were a negative. From 1930 to 1936 he worked in Berlin and London, designing for motion pictures, stage productions, and commercial exhibitions. In 1937 he went to the United States to head the light and colour department of the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946, where he was named professor of visual design, retiring in 1980; from 1967 he was director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His writings include Language of Vision (1944) and The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956).