Pepi’s place in the chronicles of art history is assured by his inclusion in many of the reviews of major exhibitions from the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, as well as in the scholarship of important critics. He was included in an important survey compiled in 2000 by Marika Herskovic, The New York School Abstract Expressionists: Artists Choice by Artists. He is featured in a number of prominent public collections, including the Smithsonian, the Heckscher Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, the Montclair Museum of Art, and such university museums as Brown University, the University of Greensboro and Tufts University. 
Among the most insightful essays on his work is a career survey by Greta

Berman, an art historian who teaches, appropriately enough, at the Juilliard School. Berman connects Pepi’s painting not only to such artistic influences as Matta, Gorky, Kandinsky and Cezanne, but to the inspirational model of music. After noting that Pepi learned to play the tenor saxophone, Berman observes: “Color and music appear parallel to him; the artist/musician improvises with both. And so it follows that Pepi’s own automatic painting and ‘line poems’ are reminiscent of works by Paul Klee, with the latter’s powerful equations of color, line and music.” Klee along with Kandinsky, an accomplished cellist, was an exemplary interpreter of the chromatic effects that could be translated from music to canvas. Pepi, too, is a connoisseur of dissonances and syncopation, as can be seen in 658 (1978), which harmonizes in a lavender key even as it riffs playfully on the looping figures he favors. The black line oscillating across the top part even looks like the musical notation for a trill. Jazz for the wall, it is one of many Pepi works you seem to hear as well as enjoy visually.