Juliet with Peacock Feather

György KepesWW-1937-116310

1937·Gelatin silver print with gouache·Image/paper: 15.3 × 11.5 cm (6 1/16 × 4 9/16 in.)

<p>György Kepes created a surreal portrait of his wife, the British painter and sculptor Juliet, by replacing her eye with a peacock feather. Half of her face appears shadowed, an effect the artist achieved by painting the right half of the print’s surface with a thin layer of gouache. The couple moved to Chicago in 1937, where György taught at the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) and Juliet enrolled as a student. Both Kepes and the school’s founder, László Moholy-Nagy, corresponded with the Japanese art critic and Surrealist poet Takiguchi Shūzō, who admired the “spirit of experiment” in New Bauhaus works such as this one.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1937
Medium: Gelatin silver print with gouache
Dimensions: Image/paper: 15.3 × 11.5 cm (6 1/16 × 4 9/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: György Kepes

Artist

György Kepes

Photography

György Kepes was a Hungarian-American artist and designer whose practice spanned photography, painting, light installation, and graphic design. A key figure in postwar American modernism, he developed a systematic approach to visual organization rooted in Gestalt psychology and the integration of art with architecture and urban space. His work emphasized the constructive potential of light, color, and geometric form as vehicles for both aesthetic and social purpose. Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, establishing a laboratory model for interdisciplinary art practice that influenced generations of artists and designers.

Lőrinci, Hungary

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