Richard E. Filipowski (1923-____ )

     Born in Poland, raised in Ontario, Canada, Richard Filipowski, called Filip, attended the Chicago School of Design,  previously named the New Bauhaus, and studied under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In 1946, he married Patricia Parker of Burlington, Iowa who studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago,  poetry at the University of Chicago,  and design and architecture at the Institute of Design in Chicago.  Many of her drawings and graphics are in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society. She later published her poetry under the name, Patricia Filipowska.
     He did freelance work in Chicago and taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago until 1950 when Walter Gropius (who had created the famous Staatliches Bauhaus in Germany whose mission was to unite art and technology. Imagery of Chess displayed a chess set from Bauhaus.) invited him to to organize and teach the course eventualy entitled "Designing Fundamentals" in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
     When Gropius retired in 1952, Filipowski took a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a teacher and artist-in-residence. He retired from MIT where his sculptures are in the collections at the MIT Museum.  His works can be found also at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as in many private and corporate collections.

 

Excerpts from a letter written by Richard Filipowski:

He [ Moholy, at the Chicago School of Design in 1942] was assigning projects and he asked me, “Do you know how to play chess?” I replied that I played chess (poorly), but that I knew what the pieces were and how they moved. He then said, “You will do a chess set. The Bauhaus did a chess set. You will do a chess set, only in plastic, and of your own design.”
...

I actually made two chess sets.
...
I turned in my chess sets to Moholy-Nagy. I was under the impression that he had given one to Mr. Walter Paepke, head of the Container Corporation of America, who was involved with the publication of Moholy’s book Vision in Motion. I didn’t know that my chess set had been in The Imagery of Chess show until, about two years later (1944), when Moholy-Nagy walked up to me in the hallway and gave me a little announcement from the show with my name included. “Look, Filipowski, you’re in a show with all these famous artists."
...
Moholy-Nagy didn’t mention to me—probably didn’t know—that John Harbeson, a major chess set collector, purchased my chess set for $150.00 on January 25, 1945, the same day he bought a Duchamp reproduction for $1.50. In 1964 Mr. Harheson donated my set, a Max Ernst set (purchased January 11, 1945, for $135.00), and a Man Ray set, all purchased from the exhibit, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.