From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Between 1964 and 1981, visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) could sit in a darkened room and contemplate opalescent wisps of colour drifting slowly across a screen. The installation, tucked in the museum’s basement, was a favourite among regulars. At times, the screen – eight feet wide and six high – was filled with diaphanous skeins of pale yellow, green, blue or pink, while at other times the light dwindled, letting most of the picture fall into darkness. It was mesmeric, unlike anything else in the museum. Unlike, probably, anything yet made in the history of humankind.
The installation was by a little-known artist called Thomas Wilfred, and had been commissioned by MoMA to inaugurate Philip Johnson’s newly designed east wing – a considerable honour. Throughout his career, Wilfred (1889–1968) had steadfastly advanced what he believed to be a new art form: light art, or, as he would call it, lumia. Since this medium was new, Wilfred also had to develop the technology on which it could be displayed – arrangements of electric light bulbs, motors, coloured filters, reflectors and so on, hidden behind frosted glass screens. This installation, Lumia Suite, Op. 158 (1963), was his masterpiece.
It was not the first lumia work by Wilfred to be displayed at the museum. In 1942, three similar, smaller light works were included in a survey of Cubist and Abstract art, one of which had recently entered MoMA’s collection. A decade later, Wilfred – born Richard Edgar Løvstrøm in Denmark before he emigrated to the United States and changed his name in 1916 – was part of Dorothy C. Miller’s epochal ‘15 Americans’ exhibition, alongside Jackson Pollock, Clifford Still, Mark Rothko and others. (Wilfred was the only artist neither a painter nor a sculptor.) In 1961 the museum bought another light work from him.
Installation view of Pluriverse assembly (2021) by Olafur Eliasson at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, in 2024. Courtesy the artist/Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Los Angeles/neugerriemschneider, Berlin; © the artist, 2021
Why isn’t Thomas Wilfred a household name today? When I came upon a darkened gallery containing four lumia works recently at the Getty Center, Los Angeles – in an almost missable annexe of the major exhibition ‘Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography’ – I was astonished by the work’s beauty, mystery and grandeur. The duration of one of the pieces, Nocturne, Op. 148 (1958), which played on a small screen, was listed as ‘5 years, 359 days, 19 hours, 20 minutes, 48 seconds’.
Surprising, too, were the facts of Wilfred’s life. He certainly did not sound like an outsider, nor – given the range of work in the exhibition, dated between 1932 and 1965 – was his output inconsistent in style or quality, as it so often is with figures who failed to find their footing in art history. His work is neither without precedent, nor is it uninfluential – in fact, today, it looks uncannily prescient of many contemporary artists’ work, including recent strains of digital art. Could it be that, in his lifetime, he was not truly considered an artist by the critical cognoscenti? And if not, why not?
‘Abstracted Light’ is one of dozens of exhibitions opening in Southern California this season as part of the Getty Foundation’s ‘PST ART: Art & Science Collide,’ a wide-ranging initiative to explore various intersections of artistic and scientific enquiry. Shows make widely varying approaches on the subject, from queer science fiction to indigenous futurism, from optics to zoology. But one rich seam throughout many of these presentations is the acknowledgment and celebration of polymathic artists: those who not only made (or make) art for galleries but who are also accomplished in other fields.
Nocturne, Op. 148 (1958), Thomas Wilfred. Carol and Eugene Epstein Collection, Los Angeles. Photo: Rebecca Vera-Martinez
At the California African American Museum, for example, an exhibition examines the radical experiments of George Washington Carver who, in the early 1900s, pioneered organic agriculture in the American South, while also making weavings and paintings using natural dyes. The Light and Space sculptor Fred Eversley, featured in the Palm Springs Art Museum’s exhibition ‘Particles and Waves’, was an aerospace engineer before he turned full time to making the polished glass sculptures for which he is now recognised. Helen and Newton Harrison, the subjects of a four-venue retrospective in and around San Diego, conducted rigorous and valuable environmental research under the rubric of conceptual art.
One of the standout solo presentations of ‘PST ART: Art & Science Collide’ is by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. Since the 1990s, Eliasson has forged a new model for being an artist – that of polymathic principal of a transdisciplinary research institute. Studio Olafur Eliasson, according to its website, ‘comprises a large team of craftspeople, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, programmers, art historians and specialised technicians’. (There is a separate Instagram account for the food made in this utopian institution.) He also runs a company supplying solar-powered ‘Little Sun’ lamps to developing countries in Africa, and a separate office for collaborative architectural design projects including a memorial park in Addis Ababa and a wine tasting room in Sonoma.
At MOCA, Eliasson’s largescale installation Pluriverse assembly (2021) has much in common with Wilfred’s lumia works, and some notable differences. In a dark gallery, visitors encounter a floor-to-ceiling scrim (several times wider than that of Lumia Suite, Op. 158) on which the effects of reflected and refracted light move slowly across. The light here is primarily white, with occasional flashes of colour apparently generated by its prismatic dispersion; in Wilfred’s work, coloured light is the primary medium. Another difference is in the shapes that the light takes. In Pluriverse assembly, sharp arcs and rings of light hint at the forms that may be used to project them; in the lumia works, the gaseous, soft-edged apparitions transcend whatever mechanical apparatus may exist behind the screen.
The greatest departure, however, that Eliasson makes from Wilfred’s precedent is by revealing this very apparatus. Visitors are allowed – indeed expected – to follow their curiosity and walk behind the screen, where a complex rig is fully on view: freestanding lights, angled mirrors and rotating glass rings, suspended on wires, all set up like a contemporary orrery. (Hence the work’s title.) Despite the revelation of this backstage trickery, the magic of the lightshow out front persists. This, in a sense, is the conceptual crux of Eliasson’s artwork.
Wilfred was not occupied – in the early stages of his career, at any rate – with the experiential dynamics of gallery installation. He started out as a performer, consumed with the production of something akin to a musical instrument. (He was also a professional lute player, before devoting himself entirely to art.) In 1919, after much experimentation, Wilfred completed his first ‘Clavilux,’ a large machine whose Latin-inspired name referred to the practice of controlling light by key. A player would sit at what was effectively a large switchboard, and manipulate a system of light bulbs, reflectors and glass diffusers to project light on to a screen.
Lumia Suite, Op. 158 (1963–64), Thomas Wilfred. Museum of Modern Art, New York
Wilfred was joining a quixotic tradition, which may be traced back at least as far as the 18th century, of pursuing the development of a ‘colour organ’ – an instrument that could translate sound into light. For most proponents, such as the 18th-century French Jesuit monk Louis Bertrand Castel or the 19th-century British painter Alexander Wallace Rimington, a colour organ should produce sound and light simultaneously, the music dictating the visuals. For Wilfred, even though he titled his works as suites, studies and opuses, the light show was always silent. He produced several models of Clavilux, and, in the 1920s, performed with a portable version in auditoriums throughout the United States and Europe.
Anticipating the institutional practices of artists such as Eliasson decades later, in 1930 Wilfred set up a non-profit organisation called the Art Institute of Light. Swelling to a membership of around 400 by mid decade, it functioned as a research centre, laboratory, library and performance space for those interested in exploring and experiencing lumia instruments. (To what extent it fostered the creativity of others, rather than bolstering Wilfred’s growing notoriety, is not entirely clear.)
Before leaving Europe, Wilfred studied painting at the Sorbonne in Paris, where his multimedia experiments projecting light on to a bedsheet met with discouragement. Nevertheless, Wilfred understood his work with lumia as consonant with visual art rather than music. Aspiring to have his work seen in galleries – not to mention collectors’ homes – around this time he reconceptualised his invention. Instead of machines that required an operator to bring them to life, he set about designing an autonomous motorised Clavilux that could play itself. In 1930 he released 16 semi-automatic domestic models – branded as ‘Clavilux Juniors’ – with walnut cabinetry and fancy hinges, emulating furniture in the way of the earliest televisions. The avant-garde collector Katherine Dreier bought one, writing breathlessly to her friend Marcel Duchamp: ‘I don’t know when I have been so thrilled or saw such possibilities.’
Unit #86 (1930), from the Clavilux Junior (First Home Clavilux Model) series by Thomas Wilfred. Carol and Eugene Epstein Collection, Los Angeles
Wilfred’s push to breach the walls of the museum, and to have his work seen alongside modernist painting, was largely successful. The artist James Turrell, a pioneer of Light and Space art in the 1960s who may be the most prominent successor to Wilfred’s ideas, remembers a visit to MoMA with his aunt in 1957:
In a walk through the museum, I encountered a work that I now believe to have been Vertical Sequence, Op. 137 (1941), by Thomas Wilfred. It stopped me in my tracks. A glowing orb of light slowly rotating and spreading about auroral spectra. Arresting for sure. But more than that. This was from our culture, from our time. It connected. Not a depiction of light – it was light, alive. And not an import from the Old World, or our interpretation of, or reaction to, the European tradition of painting. This came from here, where I came from.
Turrell responded enthusiastically to the opposing qualities that Wilfred managed to reconcile in his art, and which Turrell now entwines in his own: modernity and timelessness. Both artists employ advanced technologies to replicate aesthetic phenomena that are cosmic, otherworldly. Both artists have relied on canny marketing and myth-making to persuade influential patrons (whether Katherine Dreier or Kanye West) to install such glimpses of the infinite inside their homes.
Wilfred said he was trying to capture ‘the rhythmic flow of the universe’. At the Getty exhibition, a short video profiles Eugene Epstein, the Los Angeles-based former astronomer who since the 1960s has been the foremost collector of Wilfred’s work. Epstein says he relates to Wilfred’s aspiration. Along with his wife Carol and his nephew Adam ‘A.J.’ Epstein, he has done much to preserve Wilfred’s legacy, including the restoration of many of the 33 delicate lumia instruments known still to be in existence.
When I ask Jim Ganz, the Getty’s curator of photography and the organiser of ‘Abstracted Light’, why Wilfred is not better known, he suggests that the issue may be more mechanical than artistic. ‘The main issue, I think, is the difficulty of maintaining these devices for long-term exhibition,’ he says. ‘They were not originally intended to run continuously for eight or nine hours per day for months and months, although we’ve had some success in doing so.’
The apparatus for Lumia Suite, Op. 158 (1963–64) by Thomas Wilfred. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Ganz’s observation leads us to understand that virtually all artists – even those working with centuries-old media, like oil paint on canvas – are inventors and manufacturers, to some extent. To be really successful, the product should not only be artistically important but, ideally, be physically durable as well. During a recent panel discussion at the Getty, A.J. Epstein described Wilfred not as an outsider artist (he studied at the Sorbonne, after all) but ‘an outsider engineer’.
‘PST ART: Art & Science Collide’ celebrates the work of many such outsider engineers. Since Wilfred’s lifetime and the subsequent advent of conceptual art, which exploded traditional definitions of artistic practice, museums and academic institutions have become more flexible in accommodating non-conformists who made their own media. This November, Tate Modern opens the exhibition ‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet’, which coincides with a survey including early electronic media, ‘Electric Op’, at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York State. In Los Angeles, Hauser & Wirth is currently displaying Liquid Crystal Environment (1966/2021) by Gustav Metzger, whose auto-destructive art was, like Wilfred’s, influential on psychedelic light shows as well as challenging to conserve and exhibit.
It is curious to wonder how much the rarity of Wilfred’s lumia works contributes to their appeal. Might they have lost some of their wonder if they were as ubiquitous in our homes as screensavers or lava lamps? Perhaps. I would welcome, however, a permanent installation of one of his works in a museum near me, like the one New Yorkers enjoyed in the 1970s. And Wilfred, no doubt, would have welcomed greater recognition, during his lifetime or after it, for his prescient inventions.
Thomas Wilfred sitting at the Clavilux ‘Model E’ in c. 1924. Yale University Library, New Haven
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.