Robert Lepper
| Robert Lepper | |
|---|---|
Richard Rappaport, Robert L. Lepper, 1987
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| Born | 1906 |
| Died | 1991 |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Sculptor, muralist, educator |
| Movement | Industrial design and art |
| Awards | 1989 Industrial Designers Society of America's (IDSA) Education Award |
Robert Lepper (1906-1991) was an American artist and art professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, who developed the country's first industrial design degree program. Lepper's work in industrial design, his fascination with the impact of technology on society and its potential role for artmaking formed the background for his class "Individual and Social Analysis", a two semester class focusing on community and personal memory as factors in artistic expression, which with his theoretical dialogues with his most promising students outside the classroom fostered the intellectual environment from which such diverse artists as Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Bochner, and Jonathan Borofsky would later build their art practices.
Robert Lepper was born September 10, 1906 in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania. His parents were Elizabeth L. and Charles W. Lepper, a purchasing agent for a gas company. Charles' parents were both born in Germany. Robert had an older brother, Charles.
He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT), graduating in 1927. From graduation until 1928, he went to Europe and explored contemporary art. He then was an artist for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph and lived with his parents.
Lepper taught art from beginning in 1930 and helped to establish the one of the country's first industrial design degree program at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1934. He defined visual perception elements: area, line, space, volume, color, value and texture - and then the equivalents in industrial design, published in the 1938 "The Elements of Visual Perception, linking art elements to manufacturing processes" article.
He taught a class entitled "Individual and Social Analysis," in which he encouraged students to look at ordinary items from their daily lives as potential works of art. One of his students was Andy Warhol, then Andrew Warhola, who drew upon his meals at home and made Campbell's Soup Cans. Other notable students include Warhol's friend Philip Pearlstein, illustrator Leonard Kessler, editorial cartoonist Jimmy Margulies, conceptual artist Mel Bochner and Joyce Kozloff, who developed an interest in public art when working on Lepper's Oakland Project in which students went out into the Oakland neighborhood and made paintings or drawings of the infrastructure, buildings and people. The project was written about in Richard Rappaport's 1989 paper Robert Lepper, Carnegie Tech, and the Oakland Project. The Oakland Project was the first semester of the Individual and Social Analysis course he started in 1947; The Retrospective was the second semester class for the program.
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