Gyorgy Kepes

painter

Gyorgy Kepes, an influential designer, photographer, painter, educator, writer and aesthetic theorist, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at age 95. Mr. Kepes was best known as the founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, an organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dedicated to creative collaboration between artists and scientists. Established in 1967, the center was the culmination of Mr. Kepes's long-held view that traditional art forms could no longer adequately speak to the problems of the modern world, a world too much conditioned, he believed, by chaos and alienation. It was a decade when many artists became intrigued by the possibilities of cross-fertilization between art and technology -- most famously Robert Rauschenberg and his Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T.