During my fellowship, I continued research for the first comprehensive monograph on the Hungarian American artist György Kepes (1906–2001). I focused in particular on a chapter that traces the evolution and influence of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), the laboratory Kepes founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967. CAVS was conceived as a platform for experimentation and collaboration at the intersection of art, science, and technology.

Although the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center) in Washington, founded 12 years later in 1979, might initially appear historically distant from Kepes’s MIT initiative, closer examination reveals significant continuities, especially in their shared interest in visual information, approached from complementary perspectives. Kepes emphasized artistic practice and the systematic exploration of visual materials, whereas the Center examined imagery from a rigorous art-historical standpoint. This connection was further reinforced by the appointment of Henry A. Millon (1927–2018) as the Center’s first dean. Having previously taught at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning alongside Kepes, Millon later described that environment as a formative incubator for the integrative methodology he brought to the Center. At MIT, he noted, the department uniquely combined art-historical scholarship with design and visual literacy, a framework that resonated closely with Kepes’s pedagogical and theoretical work, including his “Visual Fundamentals” course, which trained students to observe and analyze visual phenomena spanning multiple domains.

Investigating the Center’s origins revealed broader mid-20th-century efforts to foster holistic understanding—endeavors that aimed to bridge the “two cultures” of art and science through engagement with imagery, cultivating comprehension in which aesthetic, symbolic, and scientific dimensions were inseparably intertwined. While Kepes’s 1956 publication, The New Landscape in Art and Science, established a foundational model for the aesthetics of scientific images and their organization according to art-historical principles, my research indicates that two subsequent works provide even more decisive precedents for the formation of both CAVS and the Center. In The Visual Arts Today (1960), Kepes was among the first to introduce the term “visual culture” within the context of modern art, signaling a significant analytical broadening of the categories for the study and interpretation of images. This trajectory was further developed in the six-volume series Vision + Value (1965–1966), which systematically expanded visual understanding in both cognitive and encyclopedic dimensions. Contributors to these volumes frequently overlapped with participants in the prestigious A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art—a programmatic precursor to the Center—including Naum Gabo (1890–1977), E. H. Gombrich (1909–2001), Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968), and Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968). This convergence highlights the permeability of Kepes’s editorial, theoretical, and institutional projects within the broader art-historical discourse of the period.

A particularly illustrative case is Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974), the first scientist invited to deliver the Mellon Lectures in 1969, whose contribution Science and Human Values (1956) examined parallels between human perceptual experience and disciplinary knowledge. Close textual and archival analysis demonstrates that Bronowski drew on Kepes’s manifesto, “The Visual Arts and the Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration” (1965), which announced the founding of CAVS, in envisioning his own unrealized “Centre for Arts and Sciences.”

While my fellowship allowed me to uncover only indirect evidence acknowledging Kepes as an intellectual forebear to the Center, several converging lines suggest the plausibility of such a connection. The East Building of the National Gallery, which houses the Center, was designed to institutionalize the scholarly study of art and, according to one source, then-director J. Carter Brown (1934–2002) may have invited Kepes to assist with the artistic program for its connecting spaces, thereby potentially bridging his experimental vision with the institutional aims of the National Gallery. This interpretation is further supported by correspondence preserved in the I. M. Pei Papers at the Library of Congress, which I examined closely during my fellowship. The letters document exchanges between I. M. Pei (1917–2019), architect of the East Building, and Kepes, his former colleague and close friend, highlighting the personal and professional networks through which Kepes’s ideas may have informed both the conceptual framework and the formal design of the newly established art-historical center.

Vasarely Museum
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, May–June 2025

Márton Orosz will return to his position as director of the Vasarely Museum in Budapest, where he will serve until December 2025. In 2026 he will continue his work as a Humboldt Research Fellow at ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe.