“With the mind of a scientist, the heart of a poet and the eyes of a painter”
The Kepes Institute in Eger
MúzeumCafé 34.
Hearing the name Kepes most Hungarians will probably think of a well-known TV personality with that name, but Ferenc Offenbacher and István Kaczári, founders of the Kepes Institute in Eger, would like to change that. György Kepes is far more widely known abroad than in Hungary. He was born in Selyp, a village near Eger, in 1906 and graduated from the Budapest Academy of Art. He painted throughout his life but also turned to photography and film. Over time his name acquired a permanent attribution – the “artist of light”. He had become familiar with avant-garde schools in Lajos Kassák’s Work Circle while in Budapest, then in 1930 László Moholy-Nagy called him to Berlin where he connected to Bauhaus and the masters of Russian avant-garde. In 1936, again at the invitation of Moholy-Nagy, he moved to London. From 1937 he taught at and was appointed to head the Light and Colour Department in Chicago. There he worked out his own programme involving the fundamental principle of cooperation between the scientist and the artist. He died in America in 2001 leaving a significant part of his estate to Eger. Yet that was not the starting point for establishing the Kepes Institute, since a few years had to pass before the Foundation for Complex Cultural Research entered the scene and everything came into place for it to be decided that Eger was going to preserve the memory of György Kepes. He was born near the town, and the traditions of its Eszterházy Károly College meet Kepes’s concept of the interaction between science and art. The foundation which facilitated and opened the Kepes Institute in March 2012 was originally established in 1994. In return for its renovation, the town has provided the building for 15 years, so the foundation has this amount of time to prove that their idea works.