Curator

  • Art Institute Chicago
  • Harvard art museum
  • My Exhibition
A work made of gelatin silver print with gouache.

Juliet with Peacock Feather

1937-38

György Kepes American, born Hungary, 1906–2001

United States

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.

Gelatin silver print with gouache

Photography and Media