Juliet with Peacock Feather

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.