About the Author

John R. Blakinger is the 2018-2019 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the University of Oxford.

Reviews

An overdue treatment of the Hungarian-born artist and designer Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2001) explores his career, from designing books in Berlin in the 1930s to teaching at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and founding the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. Technology and war are often common threads in Kepes's work. Innovating forms of camouflage during World War II, his designs coincided with clashes around M.I.T.'s connections with the military during the Vietnam War. Mr. Blakinger argues that Kepes represents a new form of modern artist fluent in and influenced by technology: 'the artist as technocrat.'—Martha Schwendener, The New York Times