Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and The Art of Light by yaleartgallery

LUMIA THOMAS WILFRED AND THE ART OF LIGHT

KEELY ORGEMAN With a foreword by James Turrell And essays by Maibritt Borgen, Jason DeBlock, CarolÂ Snow, and Gregory Zinman

YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY New Haven DISTRIBUTED BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS New Haven and London

Publication made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support provided by Mary-Jo and John Amatruda, B.A. 1966; Jerald Dillon Fessenden, B.A. 1960; the David Bermant Foundation; the Art Gallery Exhibition and Publication Fund; and the Friends of American Arts at Yale Exhibition and Publication Funds.

First published in 2017 by the Yale University Art Gallery 1111 Chapel Street P.O. Box 208271 New Haven, CT 06520-8271 artgallery.yale.edu/publications and distributed by Yale University Press 302 Temple Street P.O. Box 209040 New Haven, CT 06520-9040 yalebooks.com/art Published in conjunction with the exhibition Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. February 17–July 23, 2017 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. October 6, 2017–January 7, 2018 Copyright © 2017 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Tiffany Sprague Director of Publications and Editorial Services Christopher Sleboda Director of Graphic Design Proofreaders: Dan Cohen, Zsofia Jilling, and Jennifer Lu Set in Lumia, Atlas Grotesk, and Atlas Typewriter. Printed at GHP, West Haven, Conn. ISBN 978-0-300-21518-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957983 10

Cover illustrations: (front and back) Lumia Suite, Op. 158, 1963–64 (pl. 13) Endpapers: Lumia Suite, Op. 158, 1963–64 (pl. 13) Frontispiece: Detail of Untitled, Op. 161, 1965 (pl. 14) Page 6: Detail of Study in Depth, Op. 152, 1959 (pl. 11) Page 10: Detail of Multidimensional, Op. 79, 1932 (pl. 4) Page 20: Detail of Unit #86, from the Clavilux Junior (First Home Clavilux Model) series, 1930 (pl. 3) Page 48: Detail of Visual Counterpoint, Op. 140, 1950 (pl. 8) Page 62: Detail of Lumia Suite, Op. 158, 1963–64 (pl. 13) Page 74: Detail of Luccata, Op. 162, 1967–68 (pl. 15)

Contents

Directorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Foreword

Acknowledgments

Foreword James Turrell

A Radiant Manifestation in Space: Wilfred, Lumia, and Light Keely Orgeman

Lumia and Postwar Art: Space, Time, Drama Maibritt Borgen

Working with Wilfred: The Conservation of Lumia Carol Snow and Jason DeBlock

Thomas Wilfredâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Aesthetic Legacy Gregory Zinman

Plates

154

Appendix: Selected Archival Works from the Thomas Wilfred Papers

164

Exhibition History

168

Selected Bibliography

172

Photo Credits

Foreword

I entered one of my aunt’s cultural palaces, the Museum of Modern Art, on a mission to see what she considered an iconic cultural work, Monet’s Water Lilies. It was my first time in New York City and she was determined to show me the places and things she “possessed” and was passing to me as her heritage. She grew up a bonneted Wilburite (conservative) Quaker, obsessed with hats and headgear. She became a milliner in New York and made stylish and outlandish hats for Churchill Downs, Pimlico, Belmont, garden parties, and weddings. She now was coordinating editor of Seventeen magazine and was in the process of starting up a new magazine to be called Mademoiselle. My Auntie Mame. With her slim, long black dress, pearls, gloves, a cigarette holder, and, of course, a hat, she cut quite a figure. She led me briskly past guards to take me directly to “her Monet.” The Monet was impressive, just in its size within the room. A bit out of focus, I thought, but I was dutifully impressed. Not quite demonstratively enough so for my aunt. 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. Little did I know that Mr. Wilfred was actually Richard Edgar Løvstrøm, formerly of Denmark, himself an import. I stood and watched this auroral display akin to the Northern Lights. My aunt, impatient, was not as impressed. A bit dismissive, she remarked that, these days, an artist could do anything (remember, this was 1957), and that it remained for the artist to make the culture contend with their art. Looking back to that day, I can say that Wilfred’s lumia would become as prescient to me as Turner’s work was for Impressionism and even Abstract Expressionism. And perhaps as equally out of time. Wilfred had a good run. His works were shown. Pieces sold. When they stopped running, they were retired to the basement. “Go inside to greet the light,” my grandmother often said, regarding Quaker meditation. “There is a fully formed vision with the eyes closed,” as in a dream. And it is light that unites the soul, the subconscious, and the consciousawake-state. Look to the light within. It is within everyone. Physically, we take in ultraviolet light through the skin to make vitamin D. This influences our serotonin levels and counteracts depression. We are light eaters. Emotionally, through color, light influences mood, as does sound. Spiritually, many religious experiences are described using a vocabulary of light—in Saul’s epiphany on the road to Damascus, in Buddha’s description of Samadhi (the light-filled void, Enlightenment), and in a near-death experience, in which light is described as being physically present and felt. It unites the seen with the unseen, the physical with the ephemeral, the logical with the mystical, and our earth with the cosmos. My early thoughts on light, I came to realize, came from my grandmother’s

readings of Rudolf Steiner (anthroposophy), Paramahansa Yogananda (selfrealization), and Helena Blavatsky (theosophy), which she shared with me. It is the latter, Madame Blavatsky, in whom Wilfred and friends were interested. The Prometheans Early abstraction was inspired by the spiritualists. The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was close to Rudolf Steiner. Her abstract work was earlier than that of Wassily Kandinsky, another artist interested in the spiritual and art. And for my money, the paintings of Odilon Redon should not be missed. Their aural visioning of simple flower arrangements, objects, and such, seen with the vision of the dream, are magical. Redon could spiritualize the object. However, the first artist to capture my attention with the way their work dealt with light was the Russian pianist Alexander Scriabin. I was studying the psychology of perception, reading the works of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the American psychologist James J. Gibson, and was interested in sensory synesthesia. Scriabin composed music that was accompanied with light projected from a primitive color organ, played by his wife. Basically, the relationship of light to sound went through the spectrum from A to B; from low notes to high notes; from full saturation to the addition of more white light, for brighter hues, as one went up in octaves. Scriabin wrote The Poem of Ecstasy in 1908 and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire in 1910. The latter was publicly performed in 1915 with the color organ. When I had a show in Moscow at Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov’s “Garage,” I went to the Arbat to Scriabin’s house and saw his color organ. Primitive, but exciting for me to see. Here was an attempt to play the music of the spheres in light. In my study of perceptual psychology, I again came across Wilfred. Wilfred, Claude Bragdon, Van Dearing Perrine, and William “Kirk” Kirkpatrick Brice as patron formed a group they called the “Prometheans.” What’s with this Prometheus fascination? Madame Blavatsky. She influenced many in the arts at this time with her spiritualist writings, which she called theosophy. One of the purposes of the Prometheans was to construct a color organ. Though this did not result from the group, Wilfred went on to do it himself. He built the Clavilux. Light Reign From 1919 to the beginning of World War II, Wilfred worked at perfecting his light organ, from the Clavilux Model A to the Clavilux Model H. This was a fluorescent time for Wilfred. The Clavilux grew in sophistication and complexity. Its keyboard resembled that of an organ. But there was no sound accompaniment, just the music of the spheres in light. He gave his compositions titles like music, using the word opus. Many people saw his compositions, conductor Leopold Stokowski to name just one. For performances, he created not only the Clavilux but also the Clavilux Junior (see pl. 3). This model was made for home use and housed its mechanisms inside a cabinet, with a screen at the top on which the composition played.

Despite its affinities to an early television set, at this time the television had yet to be invented. As he further perfected these works, which essentially performed themselves, he began to call them “lumia,” an art form that was intended for collecting and was aimed toward the museum setting. After the Clavilux Junior, his works became more like paintings. Consisting of a box with a frosted-glass front, each work was hung like a painting on the wall. It was this type of work that arrested me at MoMA. What a time that must have been. To master light in this way is unique. You can’t form light as with clay or wax. You can’t carve it as with wood or stone. You can’t piece it together or weld it. You have to make the instrument that produces it. Something akin to dreaming up a symphony and then having to create the instruments to produce the sound. With paint, you mix blue and yellow, and you get green. What a surprise that when you mix blue light and yellow light, you get white light. You must learn the spectrum. And that is what Wilfred did. The Cheshire Cat In 1966 I was preparing for my first museum show at the Pasadena Art Museum, in California. I discussed it with my friend Dennis Halverson. His girlfriend was then Chloe Kimball, daughter of Ward Kimball. Ward heard of my interest in light. As an animator for Walt Disney Studios, he had worked on Fantasia (1940) and insisted I go to see the work of a friend of his, Oskar Fischinger. We went together to see him. They talked for some time about life, Hollywood, and lost opportunities. Ward spoke of the dream of Fantasia; it was their chance of a lifetime. Oskar had been fired from the project because he insisted on only abstract form and color. Walt Disney, though, wanted the recognizable and the figure in his film. Leopold Stokowski, who had been an early witness to a performance of Wilfred on the Clavilux, conducted the music. For Oskar and Ward, Fantasia came up short. Oskar remarked that Ward at least had the Cheshire Cat to “speak” for him. The work I saw by Oskar Fischinger was Radio Dynamics, A Composition in Rhythm and Color (1942), richly colored and redolent with circles. It developed slowly and was very moving. Again, I was reminded of Wilfred. I asked Oskar if he knew Wilfred. He was silent. I myself never met Wilfred. This I regret. In light shows that often accompanied rock performances, and especially in the work of the “Whitney brothers”—experimental filmmakers James and John, whose meditative images are accompanied by electronic music—I saw the torch was still being carried. Much of this work was developed in the West. Clement Greenberg remarked that the installation art of the West Coast was very theatrical. And what is the criticism? He said that New York was about culture and Los Angeles was about entertainment. Maintenance Dr. Vincent Lernahan taught the beginning course called “The History of Western Civilization” at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where I was enrolled in the 1960s. He was a striking presence. With a face and nose similar to Julius Caesar, he affected the likeness with his hair and countenance. The first day of the course, he asked the students to write what their definition of civilization was

Foreword

and bring that definition to the next class. He said to be brief, even one word could be sufficient. I thought of architecture, art, music, literature, power, trade, etc. I remember that I did put it into one sentence. The next class was filled with each student’s definitions respectfully being read by Dr. Lernahan. They were basically what one would expect. Some long, some short, none of just one word. He stood up, lowered his reading glasses, dramatically paused, and said, “You find the ends in the beginnings. One must look to that which is beneath. A civilization will be characterized by one thing: maintenance. When consciousness and attention leave the structures, the organization, the buildings, of a culture, it is on the way to its end.” Definitely not what we were thinking. Years later, in 1977, I was driving from Sedona, Arizona, up Oak Creek Canyon toward Flagstaff, in my Ford F-350 pickup. Near the top of the switchbacks, I saw a perfect red-and-white 1956 Chevrolet convertible with a flat tire. The car was on an incline and off in the soft shoulder. It was Dr. Lernahan and his partner. The car’s jack was inadequate for the situation. I stopped and happily introduced myself. He vaguely remembered me. My large hydraulic ranch jack easily helped me change his tire. I noticed then that the whitewall tires were rather worn. He said they were now special order and rather expensive. We shook hands, and upon leaving I said, “Maintenance.” Enter the Epsteins. The astronomer Dr. Eugene E. Epstein was also struck by his first encounter with a Wilfred work. In astronomy, the images from the Hubble telescope removed the fog of the atmosphere from our eyes and allowed a vision into the universe that changed careers and our understanding of the cosmos. Eugene soon began to collect Wilfred’s works. Bringing them back to life became an obsession for him. Wilfred was not without attention during his lifetime, though he seemed to believe that lumia was due more support than it received. Restoring the objects to working order and reviving the reputation of a seminal pioneer of light art is no easy feat but is helped along by the structures of culture, such as Yale University. Yale and the curator of this show, Keely Orgeman, play an important role in re-establishing the tradition of the direct experience of light by presenting the work of its pioneer, Thomas Wilfred. This is not a body of work that comes out of Minimalism, as is claimed by some of today’s critics. It maximizes direct perception, develops over time, is performed or performs itself. And it has ties to the populist work in the large expositions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—dioramas, panoramas, and camera obscuras were all installation works, like the Clavilux. Look elsewhere than at Minimalism for the roots of this work. In this show and publication, you will experience what has excited and delighted astronomers, filmmakers, artists, theater-lighting designers, architects, and art lovers. Writ here is a work that speaks to the long tradition of direct perception through the use of light in art. My compliments to the Epsteins, Keely Orgeman, and the Yale University Art Gallery. James Turrell November 2016

Foreword

A Radiant Manifestation in Space: Wilfred, Lumia, and Light Keely Orgeman

The present catalogue and its attendant exhibition seek to construct a concise history of the decades-long career of Thomas Wilfred (né Richard Edgar Løvstrøm; 1889–1968), a Danish-born artist who came to the United States in 1916 to pursue his burgeoning vision of an art that treated light itself as a medium. To describe his new art form, Wilfred coined the term lumia. In these entirely silent and kinetic works, he employed basic technical means— including electrical, reflective, and mechanical elements—to direct light onto translucent screens, some the size of early television sets, others of cinematic scale. The resulting multicolored compositions often mimic the effect of the aurora borealis rhythmically pulsing in the night sky, changing in palette and pattern as light fades away and then reemerges. Developed over the course of half a century, Wilfred’s wide-ranging lumia constitute one of the first aesthetic fusions of modern abstraction and technology. Before coming to the United States, Wilfred received formal training in painting and sculpture at the Sorbonne in Paris, as well as from art instructors in England and Germany. In a 1968 interview, he recalled having spent that time contemplating how traditional media might be exploited to convey a sense of light, a subject with which he had been obsessed ever since his childhood experiments with prisms.1 He ultimately concluded from his studies abroad that imitating light effects on canvas or in marble could never replicate the innate character of luminosity. “[Light] is part of the universe of flux,” Wilfred said in the same interview, “and therefore motion is a necessary dimension, in fact, in any visual art involving light.” For Wilfred, movement was crucial to his craft not as a way to engage with the mechanization of modern life, as some of his contemporaries sought to do, but as a means of suggesting the true nature of light—a force of energy that travels constantly through space. The artist, profoundly devoted to this idea, made it the foundation of his life’s work. An Overview of Lumia In 1918, while Wilfred was earning a living in New York City as a lutenist and singer of Danish folk songs, he befriended the architect-philosopher Claude Bragdon and the painter Van Dearing Perrine, and together they formed a group dedicated to the pursuit of light as an expressive medium.2 A year later, the “Prometheans,” as they called themselves, built an experimental laboratory, designed by Bragdon, on the estate of their mutual friend William “Kirk” Kirkpatrick Brice, in Huntington, Long Island. Wilfred married a Swedish pantomimist named Agda Granberg in 1921 and moved with her that year to Huntington to devote all of his available time toward developing the Clavilux,

FIG. 1.

Thomas Wilfred Sitting at the Clavilux “Model E,” ca. 1924. Sepiatoned photograph. Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375), box 16, folder 220, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

an organlike instrument with sliding keyboard controls that projected light— polychromatic, amorphous, and constantly moving—onto a large screen (fig. 1).3 In 1922, the same year in which Wilfred became a naturalized U.S. citizen, his mobile version of the Clavilux, the Model B, debuted at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse, a critically acclaimed theater built to bring dramatic entertainment to immigrants on the Lower East Side. Meanwhile, the Prometheans had disbanded, largely due to Wilfred’s insistence on following his own method of working with light, as Bragdon later recounted in his autobiography: A skilled mechanic and electrician, with clear-cut ideas of what he wanted to do and how to go about it, always on the job and utterly absorbed in it, Wilfred soon became the dominant member of our still incipient organization, and Perrine and I, instead of being participators, were relegated . . . to the role of mere spectators. Wilfred went ahead and constructed his “Clavilux” single-handed. . . . From that time forth he has devoted himself to the giving of mobilecolour recitals throughout the country, a field in which he has no competitors.4 Clearly frustrated by the dissolution of their brief alliance, Bragdon nonetheless remained respectful of Wilfred’s ambitions, acknowledging his success in promoting the spectacular visual potential of light.

Keely Orgeman

At a time when even the most forward-thinking painters still used such traditional materials as oil, watercolor, and tempera, Wilfred was devising a mechanical technique akin to painting with the rays of an electric lightbulb.5 Rare examples of light-projection instruments had existed since the early eighteenth century, beginning in 1734 with a model for the clavecin oculaire (ocular harpsicord). Constructed by the French Jesuit philosopher and mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel, this device combined candles, mirrors, and colored papers to produce light reflections whose seven spectral hues correlated to the seven tones of the musical scale. While Wilfred’s Clavilux used modern equivalents of the same internal elements (lightbulbs, reflective aluminum or mirrors, and translucent glass with added color), it differed from all previous light organs, also known as color organs, in one significant way: it was intended as a conduit for pure aesthetic experience, without the accompaniment of complementary sound.6 Apart from the references to “opuses” in many titles of his works and despite his musical background, Wilfred maintained the stance throughout his career that no physical or psychological correspondences between music and color could be scientifically proven and that lumia therefore did not belong under the umbrella of “color music,” a historical category applied to a wide array of audio-visual performance. As he saw it, the invention of an instrument meant solely for silent compositions radically differed from the earlier tradition, and his audiences tended to agree that they had never before experienced anything like it. Wilfred performed with his original mobile Clavilux as well as subsequent models of it in dozens of public “recitals” (his term for these performances) throughout the early 1920s, in cities as far afield as Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Toronto.7 The reviews published in national and international newspapers chart his ambitious itinerary and the public’s crescendo of enthusiasm, with headlines that at first cautiously embraced lumia—“Does the Clavilux Open Up a New Realm of Art?”—but that soon turned to considering it novel, as in one titled “Form, Motion, Color Cunningly Blended by Weird Clavilux: Thomas Wilfred Holds Audiences Spellbound at His Concert.”8 As the only U.S. entry in the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the World’s Fair held in Paris—fittingly, “the City of Light”—the Clavilux created a luminous display of colored abstractions inside a barge on the Seine that the French fashion designer Paul Poiret had converted into a lavish showroom. An American journalist anticipated that it would be “one of the most talked of features of the Exposition.”9 After Paris, Wilfred’s European tour continued with huge audiences attending his performances at Queen’s Hall in London and at the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen. A Danish reviewer, invoking the famous treatise Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, wrote of Wilfred’s homecoming, “If Goethe could have been in the Royal Opera House yesterday . . . he would have seen one of his life’s most beautiful dreams come true.”10 Artists, too, were taken with Wilfred’s new art form, including the domestic models he began making in the late 1920s. In 1930, for instance, the composer Vassily Zavadsky introduced Katherine S. Dreier, an influential American artist and patron of the transatlantic avant-garde, to a small lumia

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

work he had purchased for his home, inspiring Dreier to commission a similar model from Wilfred, who produced it the same year. On March 23, 1931, Dreier invited Wilfred to perform his large Clavilux in conjunction with a lecture titled “The Art of the Future” in New York, attended and sponsored by such artworld luminaries as Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as Leopold Stokowski, the future conductor of the musical score for Disney’s Fantasia.11 After the performance, Dreier encouraged the audience to come onstage to see a demonstration of one of Wilfred’s domestic versions of the Clavilux, saying, “For this little instrument will, I hope, eventually enter every home and develop a love for color as the radio and gramophone have developed a love for great music.”12 In letters written to her close friend the artist Marcel Duchamp, Dreier also extolled the possibilities of lumia and implored him to help arrange for her small model to be sent to his studio in Paris, where they could “work out” the art form together. She believed that, in their hands, lumia would eventually “electrify the world.”13 With these small home devices, Wilfred—for the first time in his career— relinquished full control of his lumia, designing several models intended for use in private settings and allowing individual owners to change aspects of the compositions. Wilfred called this type of device the Clavilux Junior (or First Home Clavilux Model) (fig. 2 and pl. 3).14 Each “unit,” or individual instrument, of this series serves a dual purpose: it is not only a mechanism capable of creating stunning lumia compositions but also a decorative object for the modern household—a two-tiered cabinet, handsome but unostentatious, with a simple wood-veneered surface punctuated by Art Deco chromium-plated hinges and latches. The latches hold shut two sets of doors, one concealing the bottom half of the cabinet, which houses the mechanism for producing the light compositions, and the other covering the top half, inside of which is a built-in, opaque screen. While the instrument is turned off, the cabinet doors remain closed and the Clavilux Junior unit functions purely as furniture. But activating the work involves merely opening the top doors, flipping a hidden switch, and darkening the surrounding room. The operator has two levels of control over the display: first, in the selection of the composition, of which there are as many as a half-dozen variations (or “opuses,” to use Wilfred’s term), each corresponding to a hand-painted “color record” (see Snow and DeBlock, fig. 1); and, second, in the ability to modify aspects of these compositions— including tempo of movement, intensity of color, and levels of brightness and darkness—by turning the knobs on what Wilfred called the “remote control,” attached to the cabinet by a cord. Although the color records and the images they transmit range broadly in palette and pattern, the compositions played on a Clavilux Junior unit universally exhibit a strong concentration of light in the bottom half of the screen (see pl. 3). Each unit from the series includes a flat plate of glass at the front of the cabinet and, just behind the glass, a concave screen onto which the composition is projected—a feature unique to this series. Light rays emanate from a bulb in the mechanism directly below the upper cabinet through the curved gap between the screen and the glass pane. The curvature molds the light into an undulating, flamelike

Keely Orgeman

FIG. 2.

Thomas Wilfred Sitting at the Clavilux Junior, ca.Â 1930. Photograph mounted on cardboard. Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375), box 15, folder 212, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

FIG. 3.

Thomas Wilfred, Unit #86, from the Clavilux Junior (First Home Clavilux Model) series, 1930 (pl. 3)

shape (fig. 3). From the cupped base of the screen, an arc of luminous bands radiates and then dissipates as the bands stretch farther away from their source. Though always shifting, this concentrated light evokes something essential and everlasting, a seemingly endless, self-generating energy, lending constancy to an otherwise shifting set of variables that constitute the Clavilux Junior’s operation. Wilfred was prolific in explaining the fundamentals of lumia—in the early years, primarily through public speeches. On November 15, 1933, he gave a lecture on his art form at Grand Central Palace, a large building in midtown Manhattan in which he had just begun renting a performance space and keeping his studio (previously located farther downtown). In his opening remarks, he addressed his aims for the program of recitals on his large Clavilux that would take place at the same location in the spring: “Before the course is over I hope to have transformed this hall into the cabin of a fantastic dream ship capable of travelling through space with the speed of thought.”15 No one in attendance would have missed his playful allusion to “the speed of light,” his phrasing here instead ironically referencing the slow and contemplative experience of viewing his work—a “weaving, folding, unfolding, passionate, impassionate, parabolic, wheeling, quiescent dance,” as poetically described by the New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell.16 Wilfred’s evocative use of the phrase “dream ship” introduced a metaphor that he would later repeat in both writings and drawings (see Borgen, fig. 3), comparing the recital hall to the cabin of a spaceship and the screen to the porthole that looks onto the vast depths of space. In his speech, he

Keely Orgeman

then turned to explaining how humanity’s dependency on the warmth of the sun to sustain life had led to the development of a rare and beautiful sensitivity toward light, “the greatest symbol of conscious mankind’s longing for understanding and spiritual liberation.”17 His concluding thoughts focused on what he called the “primitive visual experience,” the ability of humans to perceive luminous forms and movements under natural circumstances—a patch of sunlight traversing a shaded room or a shooting star—and to instinctively discern the effects that those fleeting impressions make on our bodies and minds. In essence, that evening Wilfred presented a layperson’s guide for the sensory interpretation of lumia, the experience of which feels as strange as floating through space yet as familiar as sunlight touching the skin. The occasion of this inaugural lecture was, in fact, planned to celebrate the formal opening of Wilfred’s nonprofit organization, the Art Institute of Light, which began accepting members in 1930.18 With its headquarters moved from Lower Manhattan to Grand Central Palace, located in the heart of the city, Wilfred’s institute served as a research center, technical laboratory, and performance theater for members to experiment with lumia instruments and attend such special events as the artist’s lectures and demonstrations. The membership, which grew to about four hundred by 1935, also enjoyed a seasonal program of Clavilux recitals, with Wilfred returning to the practice of the 1920s that had brought him much success. These performances attracted interest throughout the 1930s, primarily within the New York art world, though Wilfred also traveled for important commissioned performances. He received invitations, for instance, to create projected murals of moving light in the Dairy Building Theater at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago and for appearances with versions of his Clavilux, mainly at universities in the eastern United States.19 The development of small-scale lumia instruments also preoccupied Wilfred in the 1930s, as he moved away from models that could seamlessly blend into domestic interiors toward those that could be placed on pedestals or mounted to walls in museums and other public settings. This shift in format anticipated—and certainly helped precipitate—the acquisition of lumia works by major institutions, beginning in 1942 with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which purchased Vertical Sequence, Op. 137 (1941) directly from the artist. The 1930s and 1940s were also decades of significant progress in Wilfred’s mission to further separate lumia from the light-organ tradition, particularly its unwanted associations with “color music.” Even as early as his 1933 lecture, Wilfred openly disparaged the “many unfortunate attempts to establish an actual physical relation between sound and light, music and color” that were based on related nineteenth-century notions of synesthesia, and in an article he published in 1947 titled “Light and the Artist,” he added that “science has long since disproved this theory.”20 The following year, a mathematician named Edwin M. Blake, who had attended several Clavilux performances, wrote an open letter that urged Wilfred to reconsider incorporating music into his compositions. The artist’s published reply made the argument that a lumia “composer” should always be free to conceive of the luminous patterns he wishes to produce, without having to take into account the parameters of other arts.21 In 1943 Wilfred’s regular schedule of lumia recitals ended abruptly when the U.S. Army converted the Art Institute of Light’s rooms at Grand Central Palace into a recruiting and induction center for World War II enlistees. Wilfred built a

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

small studio in West Nyack, New York, where he continued under the auspices of his Art Institute to refine smaller instruments for sale to private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1958 (pl. 9); the Clairol Corporation, New York, in 1959, whose work entered the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., in 2004 (pl. 11); the Museum of Modern Art, in 1942 as well as 1961 and 1964 (pl. 13); the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha, in 1962 (pl. 12); and the Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts), in 1966.22 By the end of the 1940s, however, Wilfred had largely turned his attention to projects that could supplement his income. Theater companies from Seattle to Athens, Georgia, commissioned him to create stage sets with lumia equipment, which he called “projected scenery,” a term he would use as the title of his pioneering book on the subject, published in 1965.23 Concepts of Light in American Culture With the shift from his early travels around the country and abroad for Clavilux performances to his midcareer establishment of a permanent space for his organization, Wilfred gradually withdrew from the role of impresario in favor of dedicating himself to relentlessly refining his machines and more emphatically defining lumia in terms of light, which was not simply the “medium” of his art form but its fundamental conceit. He deemed that, without light, there can be no composition, nor any color—“an optical phenomenon non-existent without light”—to render the work of art’s distinct characteristics.24 In codifying lumia’s absolute dependence on light, Wilfred appears to have been responding to its analogous indispensability in current scientific theories of optics and the nature of the universe. At the time, American culture was steeped in investigations centering on light, especially among Wilfred’s contemporaries in the scientific fields of astronomy, cosmology, and physics. At the turn of the twentieth century, these investigations initially explored whether light behaves in the same way on Earth as it does beyond the atmosphere. Physicist Albert Michelson’s so-called Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, for instance, revealed that the speed of light could be used as a standard of measurement when tested in laboratory settings. Michelson’s findings later prompted Albert Einstein to postulate that light maintained a constant velocity no matter where it traveled, ultimately helping him to prove, in 1915, the relative variability of time and space.25 A “constant” that counterbalanced the rest of the universe’s perpetual flux, light as seen through the increasingly accepted views of Einstein represented a stable force, at least in this single but greatly important respect. In addition to proving the constancy of light’s velocity, Einstein advanced two of the most groundbreaking hypotheses of the period—first in 1905 with his theory of special relativity (which suggested, essentially, that the speed of light is constant for anyone observing it, whether that observer is stationary or moving at uniform velocity), then building on this postulate a decade later to predict that no moving object could exceed the speed of light. This theory, called general relativity, primarily concerned the concept of “space-time,” a shorthand designation for the four dimensions (height, width, depth, and time) observable in space at any given point and which entirely envelop the universe in a boundless and pliable matrix. Relativity holds that masses moving through space-time generate

Keely Orgeman

a gravitational field, the waves of which create a wake of dimpled pockets that affect the trajectories of both objects and light. In 1919 the British astronomer Arthur Eddington erased almost all doubt about this crucial aspect of relativity, when he observed how starlight surrounding a solar eclipse perceptibly shifted position. Eddington’s results confirmed, as Einstein had predicted, that gravity bent light as it passed by a massive object, rerouting the rays on a curved path through space. Widespread discussion of the topic ensued in the American press with explanations of “the Einstein theory of light,” as attempted by the head of the British astronomical society, Joseph Thomson, quoted in the pages of the New York Times. Although Thomson began with the disclaimer that it was “not possible to put Einstein’s theory into really intelligible words,” he nonetheless summarized how the discovery that the “rays of light from the stars are bent or deflected from their normal course by other aerial bodies acting upon them” had further led to “the inference that light has weight,” bringing about the “most important contribution to the laws of gravity given us since Newton laid down his principles.”26 Another story in the Times reported that the average, nonscientific person was not interested in reading about Einstein’s theory until news had gradually spread that the “older scientific hypotheses of light could be shaken to the four winds”—in other words, discarded—and only then “the man on the street began to take notice.”27 The many physicists and astronomers also interviewed for newspapers and magazines in the months and years that followed took pains to explain general relativity in simple yet detailed terms, frequently pulling in references to light rays to illustrate the theory’s basic propositions. Far from being an obscure topic during the beginning of the interwar period, then, light was of universal consequence and, through the importation of scientific thought into popular sources, was rendered available to a large population of interested observers as material for the imagination. Wilfred’s lumia drew on these new ideas of interstellar space, highly complex concepts made more understandable by contemporaneous, nontechnical texts that featured spectacular images of light phenomena. These illustrated books and articles fueled a popular fascination with astronomical and cosmological topics as diverse as the aurora borealis and distant stars. For Wilfred, light formed the cornerstone of human existence. In his 1933 lecture given at the formal opening of the Art Institute of Light, he set forth his most philosophical statements on the subject to date, suggesting that the phenomenon of light as embodied by Earth’s sun was life-sustaining, spirit-lifting, and ever-present—reminiscent of the constant, concentrated light seen in the forms produced by the Clavilux Junior units. By contrast, Wilfred also described the “spark which we call earth” as “half-extinguished,” given the cosmological theory that the world’s intrinsic energy, at its core, was gradually expiring.28 Based on this simplified formulation of the cosmos, life on our planet—one among “a cluster of sparks”—was only possible because of the process by which light traveled along curved paths (as Einstein’s theory had made widely known) from its distant source, the sun, and scattered at different angles across the earth.29 Wilfred saw the trajectory of light as responsive to objects—analogous to the way in which the rays that emanate from the Clavilux Junior’s instrument take on the screen’s shape, in this case a result of curvature rather than the physical

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

bending of light by gravity in outer space. Earth is like the top edge of that screen: rays must span a distance in order to reach it, but those that arrive animate the surface with luminous energy. Wilfred’s concept of this planet as a spark adapted a view of the cosmos held by contemporary theoretical scientists and those who interpreted their theories for the general public. A famous popularizer of scientific thought was the British astronomer and physicist Sir James Jeans, the author of many books on cosmology—including Astronomy and Cosmogony (1928), The Universe around Us (1929), The Mysterious Universe (1930), The Stars in Their Courses (1931), and Through Space and Time (1934), all of which were primers for general audiences wanting to learn about the latest space-time discoveries of the day. In the pages of The Stars in Their Courses, Jeans helped readers visualize the cosmic landscape through the lens of modern astronomy, enabling them to picture themselves journeying through space in a rocket ship with a window, through which they could closely observe the sun, moon, planets, and stars. He began the first chapter: Telescopic observation and mathematical theory between them furnish us with a sort of magic rocket which will take us almost anywhere in space we desire to go. . . . Even in the first few seconds of our flight, we notice strange changes; the whole colour-scheme of the universe darkens in hue, until it finally assumes a blackness like that of midnight, from which the stars shine out.30 This imaginary exploration of space in a “magic rocket,” involving encounters with vivid forms that materialize from the dark, calls to mind the same strategy repeatedly employed by Wilfred to render lumia’s spatial representations visible to the imagination.31 Jeans himself acknowledged that for each reader with purely scientific interests in astronomy, “there are probably a dozen who are attracted by its aesthetic appeal.”32 Through its visual descriptions and conceptual explanations, Wilfred’s 1933 lecture echoed Jeans’s account of the creation of Earth found in the scientist’s most widely read book, The Mysterious Universe, to such a large extent that it seems the artist most certainly knew the scientific text. Both Wilfred and Jeans explained that the planets came into being when an enormous astronomical body ejected tiny fragments and sent them flying through space, where they began “spinning around themselves,” as Wilfred put it. Jeans called this same orbiting action “circulating around their parent sun,” in reference to the luminous mass that threw off the fragments like the spray of an oceanic wave. “Gradually they cooled,” Jeans wrote, to the point of depending “almost entirely [on] the radiation which the sun pours down upon them,” especially the planet Earth, the only “one of these cooling fragments [that] gave birth to life.”33 Wilfred paraphrased the same theoretical idea in his own description of the formation of the cosmos: “During one fragment of a second, relatively speaking, one planet has cooled enough to permit what we call life, while its sun still retains power to emit the rays which make this life possible.”34 Such an analogy to a prominent cosmological theory, which emphasized the vitality of light, served to position lumia as an art rooted in scientific underpinnings of the greatest importance to human experience.

Keely Orgeman

The success of Wilfred’s work in the United States appears to have depended largely on his ability to articulate a relevant framework for light itself, one that connected lumia in timely ways to the questioning of the essential truths of the broader universe. Reviewers of Wilfred’s Clavilux performances adopted the emphasis he placed in his writings and public lectures on the relationship between his light abstractions and outer space. In 1922, for example, the year in which the Clavilux made its public debut, a critic for the Baltimore Sun wrote in anticipation of Wilfred’s recital: “Light being not only a vast power in the development of the world, but likewise an interstellar phenomena, the play of light artistically manipulated, Mr. Wilfred declared, must of necessity become, when developed, the most important of all arts.”35 The same year, another reviewer for the Sun quoted Wilfred’s observation that the luminous imagery of his compositions were “changing and extending as far as the eye can reach,” yet “never resembling anything earthly.”36 Phrases such as “illimitable depths and reaches” and similar evocations of infinite space became the refrain for discussing Wilfred’s first performances.37 The works to which these writers responded were similar to the imagery captured in Francis Bruguière’s rare photographs taken during one of Wilfred’s lumia recitals in 1922 (fig. 4). Bruguière’s photographs in Theatre Arts Magazine of Wilfred’s screen were explained in long captions, which noted the presence of FIG. 4.

Francis Bruguière, Photographs of Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux Recital, 1922. From: Theatre Arts Magazine 45 (1922): 24–26

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

FIG. 5.

László MoholyNagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (LightSpace Modulator), 1930. Aluminum, steel, nickelplated brass, other metals, plastic, wood, and electric motor, 59 ½ × 27 ½ × 27 ½ in. (151.1 × 69.9 × 69.9 cm). Harvard Art Museums/ Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, inv. no. BR56.5

a “central figure” of light that “opens and reopens seeming to create new color mysteries out of itself.”38 Printed in black and white, the emerging “color mysteries” read on the page as pure white light, shining so brightly as to produce a misty aura. Regenerating forms that arise from the central luminary, apparent in the four reproductions illustrated here, anticipate the ever-blooming light that became a dominant feature of the Clavilux Junior series, made eight years later. Yet, in the larger-scale work that Bruguière photographed, the light forms fill proportionately less space and are surrounded by patches of black screen that blend imperceptibly into the darkened auditorium.39 For Wilfred, darkness was to lumia as silence was to music, “the point of departure, support, and return” for all compositions. “Darkness must be established

Keely Orgeman

initial to any manifestation in the Art of Light,” he insisted.40 Particularly in Wilfred’s big-screen staging of an otherworldly atmosphere, dark conditions in the concert hall at once offered an immersive setting for deep space and a continuous, undisturbed visual field—an apparently clear portal through which light could pass. Wilfred’s construction of these spatial dynamics encouraged viewers to imagine that light was moving unobstructed before their eyes, in real time, as if physically present at that exact moment. But the viewers who were also aware of Einstein’s theories of how gravity distorts the course of electromagnetic waves as they move through space may very well have understood the impossibility that light could instantaneously proceed in a straight line, from one point to another, in the actual depths of outer space.41 Clearly, Einsteinian physics—at least in their popular form—were at the heart of Wilfred’s burgeoning artistic concepts. According to Linda Dalrymple Henderson, a leading authority on space-time and the fourth dimension in modern art, Einstein’s “initial impact in 1919 and the early 1920s had produced extensive newspaper and periodical coverage, including seventy-seven stories in the New York Times during 1921,”42 such as an explanatory essay from a Princeton physicist on what the light-bending phenomenon meant: The theory of the curvature of light, which Einstein teaches us, shows that light may be deflected, and that the star which we see in a certain place may really be somewhere else. This would make possible the curious result that, if light were curved and the universe infinite, we could see the same star by looking in different directions.43 Henderson has also observed how light functions as a “vehicle for artists responding to Einstein,”44 particularly for the well-known Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, who in 1922, the same year in which Wilfred’s Clavilux debuted, began developing a kinetic sculpture. Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage, posthumously known as the Light-Space Modulator (fig. 5), employed its shiny, exposed surfaces (unlike the concealed parts of Wilfred’s machines) to create “moving patterns of reflected light” on all the surrounding walls, as if to break open the traditional projection screen into multiple dimensions.45 This work “would become the single most important icon of the ‘space-time’ world,” Henderson claimed, and Moholy-Nagy’s own Einstein-based “spacetime theories were vital sources” for several artists, from his Dutch friend Theo van Doesburg in the early twentieth century to the American experimental filmmaker Jim Davis in more recent years.46 Wilfred and Moholy-Nagy were certainly aware of each other’s concurrent projects; in fact, Moholy-Nagy repeatedly acknowledged the contributions of Wilfred’s lumia to the development of “light painting” in his articles and books.47 Both artists embraced the “space-time world” in equal measure, treating Einstein’s theories in different but no less resonant ways.

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

Wilfred’s Light-Bending Techniques and His Engagement with Astronomy Wilfred determined the basic movements of his lumia instruments and therefore commanded the course of light through an intricate interior network of parts before it reached the screen. Each of the three series of home-use models designed in the early 1930s, for example—the First Table Model Clavilux (Luminar) (see pl. 1), the Clavilux Home Instrument (First Home Lumia Instrument) (see pl. 2), and the Clavilux Junior (First Home Clavilux Model) (see pl. 3)—employs a different configuration of electric and mechanical equipment, housed inside a protective casing of some kind, but all of the instruments use the same standard components: lightbulbs, motors, color records, and reflective materials. These parts also function inside the instruments in similar ways. The kinetic sequence in these works is initiated by flipping a switch to activate the lightbulb, which in some objects rotates by the force of a tiny motor and in others remains stationary. The bulb then transmits rays over a distance of no more than a few inches to the next element, a painted color wheel or a reflector that may or may not also rotate. Both the wheel and reflector, no matter in what order they are introduced into the sequence, pass light rays between each other and affect the path of light. These rays must invariably make contact with at least one reflective surface (more often two or three, which Wilfred called “secondary” and “tertiary” reflectors), typically a piece of sheet metal distorted in some way to shape the light. An undated drawing by Wilfred illustrates several light-bending techniques, unrelated to any specific work, involving electric bulbs, their filaments, and mirrors, the arrangement of which he could adjust accordingly when designing each composition (fig. 6). In these three hypothetical configurations, the dotted lines denote the path along which light travels through the center of one or more bulbs of different shapes (in the last example, through rotating bulbs) to a mirror, either perfectly vertical or at a 45-degree angle. From there, the light bounces onto the screen and yields variously shaped, moving, reflected forms. What Wilfred demonstrates in these examples is how minor changes in the placement of the equipment, even as subtle as the position of the bulb’s filament, allowed him to both refine the visual effects of the composition and predict certain patterns. Broadly speaking, Wilfred’s precise light-bending technique mimicked that of physicists’ laboratory experiments, which often used angled mirrors to test the velocity of light when its path was redirected by reflection. The sophistication that the artist demonstrated in his technical work shows his deep understanding of the behaviors of light—how it traveled and how it interacted with other elements in its environment—knowledge that would help him elevate this material to a status in the arts equivalent to that which it had attained in the modern sciences. In the first series of domestic works that Wilfred began making in the late 1920s, he was experimenting with instruments that pointed viewers’ eyes up toward the “illimitable depths.” In Unit #50, Elliptical Prelude and Chalice (pl. 1), an example of this Luminar model, the rays of a single bulb bounce around the interior of a mechanical box placed below a drop-leaf table, before being emitted through the top of a shaded lamp, thus illuminating the ceiling with a multicolored, swirling vortex. In the outer area of the

Keely Orgeman

FIG. 6.

Thomas Wilfred, Three Lamp, Reflector, and Form Systems, ca. 1940– 50. Ink on paper. Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375), box 22, folder 244, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

composition, the projection resembles a ring of churning clouds that obscure most of the “sky,” except for the opening around a central oculus, comprising direct and vivid beams of colored light that evoke a portal into higher space. By projecting his composition onto a horizontal surface, Wilfred explicitly dictated that the viewer engage in a mode of looking distinctly different from that of his live-performance Claviluxes and their projections onto vertical screens. Elliptical Prelude and Chalice essentially affords an individual the kind of observation made not through a “window,” as in Wilfred’s imagined spaceship, but through a telescope directed toward the stars. The 1920s saw a surge in popular astronomy. In 1928 Scientific American, which featured a full-length story on Wilfred in 1930, began to publish a regular column called “The Back Yard Astronomer,” in response to an increasing demand among its readership for instruction on how to build homemade reflecting telescopes.48 Like Elliptical Prelude and Chalice, the makeshift telescopes employed curved and reflective surfaces inside the apparatus to “see” into space. For those new stargazers, Sir James Jeans’s Astronomy and Cosmogony (1928) offered more detailed theoretical and scientific information, as well as a stark dose of reality about the fate of mankind: “Man may have appeared on the scene rather late in the history of the universe; possibly the main drama of the universe is over, and our lot is merely to watch the unwanted ends of lighted candles burning themselves out on an empty stage.”49 Like the scientist’s characterization of planets as “cooling fragments” of fire—a view Wilfred expressed in his 1933 lecture—Jeans’s metaphorical comparison of stars to barely lit “candles” portrayed them as portents of coming darkness. In Elliptical Prelude and Chalice, the sublime evocation of stormy skies opening up to the heavens supports this message. But as long as those luminous bodies remained lit, the two men seemed to agree, humanity had reason to hope for a long-term future when taking into consideration the “astronomically brief” length of time (to use Wilfred’s phrase) that the earth and stars had already existed.50 Jeans’s Stars in Their Courses (1931) provided an even more striking parallel between the moving light on the “screen” of Elliptical Prelude and Chalice and the light in what astronomers informally referred to as the “vault of the heavens”—that is, the sky viewed from Earth. The first plate of the book presents a photographic portrait of stars taken with the aid of a telescope (fig. 7), a type of photography that emerged alongside advancements in telescopic technology in the late nineteenth century. Recalling Wilfred’s own swirling composition, the photograph shows “star trails,” concentric circles of starlight that resulted when a photographic plate was pointed toward the night sky and exposed over a few hours. While the image makes it appear as though the stars have moved in a circular motion around the sky, it actually illustrates that the Earth turns on an axis. Through its appearance of some elements being fixed and others moving, Elliptical Prelude and Chalice elicits in the viewer a parallel disjunction between sensing and knowing, between being captivated by the illusion that the night sky eddies above and yet understanding that we ourselves, as inhabitants of a rotating planet, are in fact the things subject to this motion.

Keely Orgeman

FIG. 7.

Photograph of the Rotating Dome of the Sky, Norman Lockyer Observatory, East Devon, England, ca. 1931. From: Sir James Jeans, The Stars in Their Courses (New York: Macmillan Company, 1931), 7

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

Elliptical Prelude and Chalice, as well as the other tabletop works in this series, marked Wilfred’s final attempt to simulate the viewpoint of an observer looking upward through a telescope. Beginning in the early 1930s, all other lumia created after this style of home model reinstated the conventional orientation of the screen to a vertical “window” onto interstellar space. Another development, by the middle of the decade, was their fixed temporal dimensions—as in Abstract, Op. 91 (The Firebird) (pl. 5), which displayed a static image, and Tranquil Study, Op. 92 (pl. 6), consisting of moving forms but ones that unfolded linearly, from beginning to end, without the ability to be altered. Wilfred’s new interest in controlling all the visual effects of his designs, partly as a way to experiment with a new format and partly to transition into different markets for lumia (primarily the art world), concurrently led him to create instruments that played compositions with longer durations. The first of this model was probably Multidimensional, Op. 79 (pl. 4), made in 1932, in which light rays from a bulb are aimed at a rotating lens—a clear jar filled with a transparent glass cord. On the work’s small screen, the compositional display appears slightly out of focus, as though filtered through a scrim. This dimming effect may not have satisfied Wilfred; he tended to prefer a sharper quality of light, something that became a dominant feature of subsequent automated works. The soft glow of Multidimensional, Op. 79, on the other hand, faded from his repertoire. Starting with Vertical Sequence, Op. 136 (pl. 7), from 1940—the earliest cyclical composition of long duration, with a fixed color and form cycle that would not repeat for over a day—Wilfred’s lumia resonate with a different type of star photography, then abundant in nontechnical texts on astronomy. These images consisted of close-up views of star clusters (nebulae), rendered by constantly adjusting the position of the telescope to account for the rotation of the earth. The results of this exacting process were brilliantly shining yet cloudy pictures of what Jeans nicknamed “star-cities,” such as one taken in 1930 at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles (fig. 8), home of the world’s most powerful telescope at the time. The relationship between Wilfred’s mature lumia compositions, from the 1940s onward, and the milky opalescence of stars recorded in photographic stills extends beyond superficial resemblances. Just as fully automatic, preprogrammed works like Vertical Sequence, Op. 136 present the viewer with constantly morphing imagery for extended observation, the nebular photograph prompts the scientist to observe closely, too: the longer one looks, or the more one knows what to look for, the more recognizable specific properties of light become. In both cases, there is more to the image than at first meets the eye; upon reflection, an astute observer begins to decipher a visual vocabulary of luminosity that applies to both lumia and stars alike. For example, when viewed by the naked eye, two nebulae of the same color may appear to have the exact opposite degree of intensity (measured in a unit of illumination called “footcandles”),51 but the “camera” of the telescopic lens allows the astronomer to correlate a nebula’s intensity with any color on the visible spectrum.52 On an exponentially smaller scale, the underlying structure of a lumia composition maintains this correlation between color and intensity.

Keely Orgeman

FIG. 8.

Photograph of the Trifid Nebula M 20 in Sagittarius, Mount Wilson Observatory (now Carnegie Observatories), LosÂ Angeles, ca. 1930. From: Sir James Jeans, TheÂ Universe around Us (Cambridge: University Press, 1930), 44

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

FIG. 9.

Thomas Wilfred, Lumia Diagram, ca. 1940â&#x20AC;&#x201C;50. Ink on paper. Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375), box 22, folderÂ 244, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

Keely Orgeman

Wilfred’s instructive diagram on lumia’s constituent elements (fig. 9) shows that he would first decide on what forms to create and then determine the color palette—the hues of the work’s color record—followed by the addition of “chroma” and “value.” Chroma is the percentage of gray mixed with a hue (created by light rays being absorbed by the record), while value is the amount of white in that mixture (produced by those rays being reflected off the record). Finally, Wilfred identified the degree of intensity to be added to the light. Although his diagram lists intensity last of all the sub-factors of color, as if the least important, he considered it crucial for emphasizing certain chromatic passages. Turning up the wattage on the electric light, as he pointed out in his writings, could imbue a climactic moment in the composition “with dazzling, sun-like intensity, using for contrast an absolute and velvety darkness.”53 Wilfred relied on the intensity of light to provide visual accents, marking the image with meanings that can be aesthetically interpreted. In addition to conveying information about the physical characteristics of stars, astronomical photography enabled scientists to calculate the spatial dimensions of the aurora borealis—the spectacular phenomenon in the sky to which lumia compositions were often compared.54 In 1934, writing about the natural display that could rarely be seen below the Arctic Circle, a reporter from Popular Mechanics brought these strands of auroral and artistic light into conversation with an analogy that seemed obliquely to refer to Wilfred, the world’s premier light-and-color organist of the twentieth century: If you live in the northern half of the United States and have been fortunate, you stepped outside some night and saw . . . bright lights with draperies of greenish hue, perhaps bordered with red at the bottom, [which] danced before your eyes, changing in form as though blown by the winds. Again you may have observed crowns of blue rays, arches and other fantastic effects, wavering and shimmering as though manipulated by a master at the control of a giant color organ.55 Accompanied by hand-colored photographs (fig. 10), sensational descriptions of the aurora borealis contributed to the popular scientific discourse and illustrated the phenomena for those who could not witness it firsthand. Yet, even the author of this article sensed that any written or visual substitutes for the actual experience were insufficient; after likening the northern lights to a color-organ concert, in the next sentence he pronounced the artificial spectacle inferior: “When Mother Nature sets out to put on a show, she outdoes the wildest dreams of the theatrical impresario.”56 Wilfred’s supporters in artistic circles, on the other hand, found the experience of lumia to be remarkably comparable to that of the aurora. Critics who reviewed the artist’s immersive compositions on the Clavilux, played at international and national venues in the 1920s, had from the start drawn these parallels: “If you could leap into the heart of the aurora and catch an armful of its pendulous glory,” said one reviewer in 1924, “you would only know a part of what the Clavilux has to show.”57 Fifteen years later, the Times’s Jewell

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

FIG. 10.

Photograph of the “Auroral Drapery Which Slowly Changes in Shape as if Blown About by the Wind,” ca. 1933. From: “The Mystery of the Northern Lights,” Popular Mechanics (January 1934): 28

quoted his fellow critic Alfred Frankenstein, of the San Francisco Chronicle, who said the experience of lumia was “as if one were witnessing a kind of sidereal choreography—a dance of comets and galaxies with the boreal aurora as backdrop and, beyond that, the velvet blackness of infinite, universal space.”58 Here, as in the earlier review, art was judged to outshine nature, with the aurora relegated to a stage set. When Jewell elaborated on his own critical opinion, however, he took the idea even further, asserting his affinity with Wilfred’s own view of his work and advocating for others to understand lumia as an “integral spacetime art,” a serious “field” of inquiry that “demands constant research, [and] tireless constructive experimentation.”59 An unequivocal endorsement of the artist’s ambitions, Jewell’s comments worked to collapse distinctions between science and art, suggesting that lumia participates in an interdisciplinary exploration of space and time, as opposed to merely simulating an otherworldly drama. Lumia’s visual relationship to the aurora borealis exposes an aspect of the works’ complexity: like the spectacular yet confounding polar lights, Wilfred’s art could be poetically described but not so readily understood as a singular and selfreferential phenomenon. It depended on other manifestations of light in space to provide a meaningful context. Despite his many performances, the dozens of reviews of those performances, his writings, and his drawings, it seems that we,

Keely Orgeman

as renewed observers of lumia, are just beginning to see the broader implications of what it meant for Wilfred to harness this material. By the end of his career, Einstein famously settled on the notion of infinity as a finite yet bendable volume of a sphere that defines the shape of the universe. Similarly, in a late text of 1956, Wilfred conceded that human beings “are unable to conceive of eternity” as a boundless temporal dimension. But Einstein’s reimagined spatial definition seemed to give Wilfred reason to believe that the eternal could, conceptually, follow a similar logic. As Wilfred wrote: Is it not conceivable that each single proton in the nucleus of an atom encloses another universe? . . . Or is it not further conceivable that such dimensional transitions continue ad infinitum in both directions and along a curvature eventually bringing them together again in an Einsteinian fusion of dimensions to form an awe-inspiring ring, a perfect manifestation of Eternity?60 Today Wilfred’s spiritual-scientific interpretation of the cosmos, subtly invoking his own artistic conception of light as a “perfect manifestation” of something seemingly as ungraspable as eternity or space, resonates in ways that he probably could not have imagined. Like any other modern artist, Wilfred hoped to at once build on preexisting aesthetic concepts and propose new ones. He was loath to acknowledge the influence of others on his own ideas and often disparaged attempts to cross-pollinate lumia: it belonged neither to the tradition of the seven “established arts,” as he referred to them, nor in the category of “color music” that combined visual expressions with sound.61 To his mind, the only acceptable alternative was lumia’s separation into a sphere of artistic practice and thought unto itself. While this relative isolation possibly hindered his reputation and the wider acceptance of his work, what it has also done, in retrospect, is allowed lumia to transcend any one group of artists or their sets of interests. Instead, Wilfred has left us with an open door and, following the lead of his supporter Katherine Dreier, a provocative invocation to wonder at what nearly limitless directions the art of light may yet take.

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

Notes

The title of this essay is taken from a drawing by

Wilfred objected to such comparisons between

Thomas Wilfred, in which he describes light as “a

painting and lumia on the basis of the formal

radiant manifestation in space” (see fig. 9).

differences of the two media. For example, in 1948, he wrote, “It is obvious that the rules

governing static composition and static color

Thomas Wilfred, interview by Patricia Marx,

harmony in painting do not apply to form and

WNYC, July 18, 1968, https://www.wnyc.org

color in motion” (italics in the original). However,

/radio/#/ondemand/351618 (accessed July 20,

the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy,

2016). In the interview, Wilfred mentioned that

Wilfred’s contemporary, applied the term light

he studied in England and Germany, though

painting to his work and to that of Wilfred and

the present author has been unable to verify

other artists who were creating kinetic light

through archival research which schools he may

objects. More recently, the historian Stephen

have attended. There are no known paintings or

Eskilson has argued that Wilfred adopted the

sculptures by Wilfred from this period. 2.

conceptual framework of painting to establish a

Materials that relate to Wilfred’s performances

foothold in the art world. See Thomas Wilfred,

on the archlute can be found in his archival

“Composing in the Art of Lumia,” Journal of

papers; see box 15, folder 207, and box 26,

Aesthetics and Criticism 7, no. 2 (December

folders 253–56, Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS

1948): 89; László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion

1375), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University

(Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 166, 252;

Library, New Haven, Conn. 3.

Intermedia: Seeking a Framework for Lumia,”

and their son, Thomas C. Wilfred, was born at

Leonardo 36, no. 1 (2003): 65–68. Maibritt

the estate in the following year. The couple also

Borgen’s essay in the present publication also

had a daughter, Agnete Wilfred, born in 1924.

makes a case for re-examining lumia in relation to painting.

Claude Bragdon, Secret Springs: An Autobiography (1917; New York: Cosimo, 2005),

Thomas Wilfred, “Light and the Artist,” Journal

120–21. On Bragdon, see also Linda Dalrymple

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5, no. 4 (June

Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-

1947): 250, credits his friend Van Dearing

Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton,

Perrine with building the first projection

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 186–201;

instruments to treat light as an independent

and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Claude

medium. In that essay, he also acknowledges

Bragdon, the Fourth Dimension, and Modern

his predecessors in the field of color-organ

Art in Cultural Context,” in Claude Bragdon

performance, including Castel, as well as

and the Beautiful Necessity: Eleven Essays,

nineteenth-century practitioners Bainbridge

exh. cat., ed. Eugenia Victoria Ellis and Andrea

Bishop and Alexander Wallace Rimington,

G. Reithmayr (Rochester, N.Y.: Cary Graphic

and the early twentieth-century creator of the

Arts Press, Rochester Institute of Technology,

symphonic poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire

2010), 73–86. While working in the Huntington

(1910), Alexander Scriabin, whose famous work

studio in the early 1920s, Wilfred employed

was the inspiration behind the Prometheans’

assistants Elizabeth Eldand and Fenn Germer,

group. See Thomas L. Hankins and Robert

from about 1924 to 1926. Though Germer

J. Silverman, “The Ocular Harpsichord of

appears to have played a more important

Louis-Bertrand Castel; or, The Instrument That

role—apparently performing the Clavilux in

Wasn’t,” in Instruments and the Imagination

Wilfred’s absence during some recitals—his

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

assistantship was short-lived. By the late 1920s,

Press, 1999), 72–85; and Kenneth Peacock,

Germer was reportedly serving as a secretary

“Instruments to Perform Color-Music: Two

to the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had

Centuries of Technological Experimentation,”

recently begun to withdraw his allegiance to

Leonardo 21, no. 4 (1988): 397–406. For more

the teachings of theosophy, the mystical and

on the interests in sound and light pursued by

occultist philosophies followed and expounded

Wilfred’s former associates and later followers,

by Bragdon. For Wilfred’s correspondence with

see Gregory Zinman’s essay in the present

Germer, see box 1, folder 23, Thomas Wilfred

publication.

Papers (MS 1375), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

and Stephen Eskilson, “Thomas Wilfred and

Wilfred married Agda Granberg on May 14, 1921,

Keely Orgeman

Wilfred’s Clavilux models from the 1920s (including the Model A, B, C, D, E, F [unfinished],

G, and H) have not survived intact, though the

15.

of Light, Grand Central Palace, New York,

fig. 1) are now in the collection of AJ Epstein.

November 15, 1933, transcript, p. 1, box 15, folder 203, Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375),

“Does the Clavilux Open Up a New Realm of

Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University

Art?” Atlanta Constitution, February 8, 1923;

Library, New Haven, Conn.

and “Form, Motion, Color Cunningly Blended by Weird Clavilux: Thomas Wilfred Holds

16.

Has Accomplished with His Clavilux at Art

[Toronto], January 6, 1925.

Institute of Light—Abstractions in New Major Medium,” New York Times, June 16, 1935.

“One of Poiret’s Houseboat Fleet Lending Zest May 7, 1925.

17.

Wilfred, “First Lecture,” 3.

18.

Both Katherine S. Dreier and Leopold

An excerpt of this review, which appeared in the

Stokowski were founding members of the Art

Copenhagen newspaper Politiken, is included

Institute of Light.

in Wilfred’s archival papers, in a document with other excerpts of reviews from around the

19.

Papers (MS 1375), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale

document, see box 10, folder 156, Thomas Wilfred

University Library, New Haven, Conn. On May

Papers (MS 1375), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale

15, 1928, Wilfred performed at Yale University’s

University Library, New Haven, Conn. “The New School for Social Research Presents an Evening with the Art of the Future under

Harkness Theater. 20.

1947, Wilfred wrote another published manifesto

brochure, box 26, folder 763, Katherine S. Dreier

for the same journal in the following year, titled

Papers, Société Anonyme Archive (MS 101), Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Stokowski

“Composing in the Art of Lumia”; see n5, above. 21.

Criticism 6, no. 3 (March 1948): 272.

more on Stokowski, see the essay by Gregory 12.

Katherine S. Dreier, “The Art of the Future,” typewritten remarks for lecture, box 45, folder 1348, Katherine S. Dreier Papers, Société Anonyme Archive (MS 101), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

13.

Katherine S. Dreier, letter to Marcel Duchamp, August 19, 1930, box 12, folder 317, Katherine S. Dreier Papers, Société Anonyme Archive (MS 101), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Dreier continued to write to Duchamp about Wilfred’s “invention” and also became an important supporter of lumia in the 1930s. Duchamp expressed interest in her proposed project, but it seems the idea never came to fruition.

14.

Edwin M. Blake and Thomas Wilfred, “Letters Pro and Con,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art

also owned one of Wilfred’s home units; for Zinman in the present publication.

Wilfred, “First Lecture,” 5; and Wilfred, “Light and the Artist,” 247. In addition to his article from

the Auspices of the Société Anonyme,” event

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,

See “List of Clavilux Recitals and Engagements,” 1922–41, box 10, folder 158, Thomas Wilfred

world that he probably used for publicity; for the

11.

Edward Alden Jewell, “What Thomas Wilfred

Audiences Spellbound at His Concert,” Globe

to Art Fair in Paris,” Women’s Wear [New York], 10.

Thomas Wilfred, “First Lecture,” Art Institute

four keyboard modules of the Model E (seen in

22.

The object owned by the Honolulu Museum of Art is Convolux, Op. 160 (1966). For more complete lists of Wilfred’s works, see “A List of Lumia Compositions by Thomas Wilfred,” 1919–65, box 10, folder 220, Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.; and Donna M. Stein, Thomas Wilfred: Lumia, A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1971), 81–91. At the end of his career, Wilfred received three important commissions. The first two—Study in Depth, Op. 152 (pl. 11), for the lobby of the Clairol Corporation’s headquarters in New York City, in 1959, and Orientale, Op. 155 (now lost), for the Lasalle Corporation’s department store in Toledo, Ohio, in 1962—were Wilfred’s only two major commercial projects. The third commission was for the Museum of Modern

For the archival record in which Wilfred lists the

Art (MoMA), New York, which officially

sixteen Clavilux Junior units and their owners,

acquired Lumia Suite, Op. 158 (pl. 13) in 1964,

see box 15, folder 212, Thomas Wilfred Papers

representing the most significant institutional

(MS 1375), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale

support that the artist received in his career.

University Library, New Haven, Conn.

Commissioned by MoMA in 1963, Lumia Suite

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

23.

was a popular favorite over the time it remained

entire notebook kept by Jeans, and his books’

on almost continuous view at the museum until

inclusion of spectacular images of stars and

1980. In anticipation of the present exhibition,

galaxies set them apart visually from many other

a conservation team from the Yale University

popular-science publications at the time. See

Art Gallery and MoMA have partnered to

Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse

restore Lumia Suite to its original, spellbinding

of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy

effect. For more on this work, see the essays by

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Maibritt Borgen and by Carol Snow and Jason

On popular-science books of the early twentieth

DeBlock in this publication.

century, see also Michael Whitworth, “The Clothbound Universe: Popular Physics Books,

Thomas Wilfred, Projected Scenery, A Technical

1919–1939,” Publishing History 40 (1996): 53–82.

Manual (New York: Drama Book Shop, 1965). 24.

Blake and Wilfred, “Letters Pro and Con,” 274.

25.

In his published letter to the mathematician Edwin M. Blake, Wilfred cited a passage from

32.

Sir James Jeans, The Universe around Us

33.

Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New

(Cambridge: University Press, 1929), 11. York: Macmillan, 1930), 3.

Michelson’s book Light Waves and Their Uses (1903), in which the physicist advocated for

34.

of this cosmological theory, see Norriss S.

light. Michelson wrote, as quoted in Wilfred’s

Hetherington, ed., Encyclopedia of Cosmology:

letter, “It seems to me that we have here at least

Historical, Philosophical, and Scientific

as great a possibility of rendering all the fancies,

Foundations of Modern Cosmology (New York:

moods, and emotions of the human mind as

Garland Publishing, 1993), esp. 116–35; and

in the older arts.” Given that Michelson’s book

Craig Sean McConnell, “Twentieth-Century

predates the Clavilux by almost two decades, he

Cosmologies,” in Science and Religion: A

intended his remarks as commentary on “color

Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren

music” more generally, rather than as praise of

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

Wilfred’s work specifically. However, in later

2002), 314–21.

years, Michelson might have seen Wilfred perform in Chicago, where the scientist lived during the 1920s. In addition to giving a Clavilux recital in Chicago in 1922, Wilfred was also

35.

“Believes Light Will Outweigh Power of Music,”

36.

“Inventor Now Plays Symphonies in Colors,”

Baltimore Sun, June 2, 1922. Baltimore Sun, April 2, 1922.

commissioned to construct a lumia installation in the Bal Tabarin, the ballroom of Chicago’s

26.

37.

Baltimore Sun, November 24, 1920, also

Albert A. Michelson, Light Waves and Their

published in Vanity Fair 15, no. 4 (December

Uses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1920): 53, 116. See also M. S. W., “‘Organ of

1903), 2.

Light’ an Amazing Climax to Inspiring P. E. Spectacle,” Baltimore Sun, June 5, 1922.

“Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” New York 38.

findings of the eclipse expedition, see “Einstein Expounds His New Theory,” New York Times,

39.

On the subject of darkness in moving-image media, see Noam M. Elcott, “In Search of Lost

December 3, 1919.

Space: Stan Douglas’s Archaeology of Cinematic

“Don’t Worry over New Light Theory,” New York

Darkness,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 151–82.

Times, November 16, 1919.

See also Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness:

28.

Wilfred, “First Lecture,” 2.

29.

Ibid.

30.

Sir James Jeans, The Stars in Their Courses

An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 40.

box 1, inv. no. 1995-M-038, Thomas Wilfred

also Sir James Jeans, Through Space and Time

Papers (MS 1375), Manuscripts and Archives,

(Cambridge: University Press, 1934), 1, in which Jeans reintroduces the same theme. With gratitude for her research, I credit scholar

Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn. 41.

that Changed Our Understanding of Time

between the writings of Virginia Woolf and

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

popular texts in astronomy with introducing points out, news clippings on the release of The Mysterious Universe alone filled an

Keely Orgeman

See Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate

Holly Henry’s book on the intersections

me to the work of Sir James Jeans. As Henry

Thomas Wilfred, “Lumia: The Art of Light,” ca. 1945–50, unpublished and annotated manuscript,

(Cambridge: University Press, 1931), 24–25. See

Stark Young, “The Color Organ,” Theatre Arts Magazine 45 (1922): 25.

of reactions in the New York Times to the

31.

Virginia Farmer, “Color as a Separate Art,”

Hotel Sherman in 1929. See ibid., 271; and

Times, November 10, 1919. For another example

27.

Wilfred, “First Lecture,” 2. For overviews

further developments in the aesthetic use of

2015), 263. 42.

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Einstein and 20thCentury Art: A Romance of Many Dimensions,”

43.

in Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in

their energy states changing from high to low,

Science, Art, and Modern Culture, ed. Peter

the atoms and molecules finally release their

Galison (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

energy in the form of light. On the scientific study

Press, 2008), 118.

of the aurora during the early twentieth century, see Helge Kragh, “The Spectrum of the Aurora

L. P. Eisenhart, “Even Einstein’s Little Universe

Borealis: From Enigma to Laboratory Science,”

Is Big Enough,” New York Times, February 2,

Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 39,

1921. Earlier experiments had determined that

no. 4 (Fall 2009): 377–417.

the sun and stars could be viewed from Earth only as manifestations of the past, due to the

55.

the light from the sun, for example, reaches the planet in just over eight minutes. See Jimena

56.

also Paul Paddock, “The Latest Mystery of the

New Yorker (November 20, 2015), http:

Heavens,” Popular Mechanics (August 1928):

//www.newyorker.com/tech/elements

266–71; and James Nevin Miller, “What Are the

/albert-einsteins-sci-fi-stories (accessed

Northern Lights?” Popular Mechanics (November

July 20, 2016). Henderson, “Einstein and 20th-Century Art,” 114.

Ibid. For periodical literature on the study of the aurora borealis in the 1920s and 1930s, see

Canales, “Albert Einstein’s Sci-Fi Stories,”

44.

“The Mystery of the Northern Lights,” Popular Mechanics (January 1934): 28.

time it took for their rays to travel that distance;

1928): 792–96. 57.

“Coming Attractions: Thomas Wilfred and the Clavilux,” Globe [Toronto], December 22, 1924.

45.

Ibid., 111.

46.

Ibid., 325n39. Henderson has not considered

Fine Arts: Contemporary American Painters at

Wilfred to be part of the milieu of artists

the Two Fairs,” New York Times, September 10,

explicitly engaged with space-time theories,

1939. Frankenstein’s quotation is also cited in

though she has discussed his work in the

Sonia Stein, “It’s a Nice Present, If You Can Get

context of the fourth dimension. See Henderson,

It,” Washington Post, December 23, 1951. For

The Fourth Dimension, 194, 231–32, 234.

other reviews of lumia that mention the aurora

47.

58.

borealis, see Thomas Young, “Inventor Flashes

László Moholy-Nagy, “Production-Reproduction

Brilliant Illusionary Pictures with His Marvelous

(Produktion-Reproduktion),” De Stijl, no. 7

Invention,” New Journal and Guide [Norfolk,

(1922): 97–101, translated in Krisztina Passuth,

Va.], April 17, 1926; and “The Clavilux,” Globe

Moholy-Nagy (New York: Thames and Hudson,

[Toronto], February 5, 1929.

1985), 290; László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, English ed. (London: Lund

59.

Jewell, “Of Space, Time, and the Fine Arts.”

Humphries, 1969), 20, translated from the

60.

Wilfred, “Musing on the Spheres.”

61.

Although Wilfred occasionally paired music

original Malerai, Fotografie, Film (1927); and Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 166, 252. 48.

“Light Furnishes Ballroom Decoration,” Scientific American 142, no. 6 (June 1930): 464–65.

49. 50.

with an existing lumia composition or specially composed an accompaniment of colored light for a musical score, he vastly preferred to show his work in silence. For a statement of his stance on

Sir James Jeans, Astronomy and Cosmogony

color music, see Blake and Wilfred, “Letters Pro

(Cambridge: University Press, 1928), 421.

and Con,” 265–76. On the subject of color music,

Thomas Wilfred, “Musing on the Spheres,” 1956, unpublished manuscript, box 1, folder 13, Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

51.

Edward Alden Jewell, “Of Space, Time, and the

Jeans prefers the term candle-power in

see Judith Zilcer, “‘Color Music’: Synaesthesia and Nineteenth-Century Sources for Abstract Art,” Artibus et historiae 8, no. 16 (1987): 101–26; and Kerry Brougher and Olivia Mattis, eds., Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900, exh. cat. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005).

reference to the strength of starlight. See Jeans, The Stars in Their Courses, 71. For Wilfred’s explanation of intensity “measured in footcandles,” see Wilfred, “Composing in the Art of Lumia,” 87. 52.

See Jeans, The Stars in Their Courses, esp. 63–91.

53.

Wilfred, “Composing in the Art of Lumia,” 79.

54.

The aurora borealis is a phenomena caused by electrons colliding with the outermost region of Earth’s atmosphere. In the process of

A Radiant Manifestation in Space

Photo Credits

Every effort has been made to credit the artists and the sources; if there are errors or omissions, please contact the Yale University Art Gallery so that corrections can be made in any subsequent editions. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.: Zinman, fig. 1; Bettmann Collection/Getty Images: Zinman, fig. 2; Photo by Peter Brenner: Zinman frontispiece, pl. 15 (projections); © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Photo by Howard Agriesti: pl. 2; Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York: Zinman, fig. 9; Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn: Orgeman, fig. 5; Courtesy Pierre Huyghe/ Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) and Marian Goodman Gallery, Photo by Marcus J. Leith: Zinman, fig. 12; Courtesy Ken Jacobs, Photo by Bryony McIntyre: Zinman, fig. 8; Photo by Yael Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images: Zinman, fig. 7; Joshua Light Show, Photo © Amalie R. Rothschild: Zinman, fig. 5; Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, N.Y. © 2016 The PollockKrasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: Borgen, fig. 4; Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, N.Y.: Borgen, figs. 2 and 6; Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Estate of Marcel Duchamp:

172

Borgen, fig. 1; © Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: Borgen, fig. 5; Image © San Jose Museum of Art, Photo courtesy San Jose Museum of Art/Richard Karson: Zinman, fig. 11; © Estate of W. Christian Sidenius: Zinman, fig. 4; © James Turrell, Photo courtesy The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Zinman, fig. 10; Photo by Rebecca Vera-Martinez: frontispiece, Acknowledgments frontispiece, Borgen frontispiece, pls. 4, 7–8, 10, 14 (projections); Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: Zinman, fig. 3; Courtesy Joshua White: Zinman, fig. 6; © Graphic Design, Department, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.: Snow and DeBlock, fig. 5; © Visual Resources Department, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.: Cover and back cover ills., endpapers, Director’s Foreword frontispiece, Orgeman frontispiece and figs. 2–3 and 6, Borgen fig. 3, Snow and DeBlock frontispiece and figs. 1–4 and 6–7, pls. 1, 2 (object), 3, 4 (object), 5–6, 7–8 (object), 9, 10 (object), 11–13, 14–15 (object), Appendix ills.; Courtesy Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.: Orgeman, fig. 1