Juliet with Peacock Feather

Description

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.

Juliet with Peacock Feather

György Kepes

1937-38

Accession Number

142600

Medium

Gelatin silver print with gouache

Dimensions

Image/paper: 15.3 × 11.5 cm (6 1/16 × 4 9/16 in.)

Classification

gelatin silver (developing-out-paper) pr

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Maurice D. Galleher Endowment