Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light

Thomas Wilfred, Lumia Suite, Op. 158, 1963–64, projectors, reflector unit, electrical and lighting elements, and a projection screen; approx. 9 years, 127 days, 18 hrs. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 582.1964.

Through mid-summer, the Yale University Art Gallery, a treasure within a city known for its arts and culture, highlights Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968), inventor of lumia, the “art of light.” Wilfred “began thinking about light at the same time as Einstein was evolving his theory of light and how light moves in space,” said Keely Orgeman, assistant curator in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture at Yale. He rose to prominence through his projected light shows.

Abstract Expressionists, astronomers, experimental filmmakers and psychedelic artists including Joshua White, whose light shows animated the 1960s, were early admirers. Then, except for dedicated private collectors, Wilfred was largely forgotten, much of his life’s work dissembled and placed in storage. Now Wilfred’s ethereal, dance-like compositions, representing about half of his surviving work, are reanimated within a theatrical gallery setting.

Trained in painting and sculpture, the self-styled maestro relocated to New York from his native Denmark in 1916 and by the early 1920s was mesmerizing international audiences with his kinetic light-works. Attired to resemble a conductor, Wilfred operated or “played” his Clavilux (Latin for light played by key)—a soundless keyboard that he invented. This “color organ” molded rays from a light bulb that then passed through translucent colored glass creating a palette of flowing light. “If you could leap into the heart of the aurora,” wrote a reviewer in 1924, “you would only know a part of what the Clavilux has to show.”

Wilfred continually refined his inventions, giving Clavilux performances, developing home-use projection machines that prefigured television and designing large-scale pieces for museums. In 1951, alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, he was included in the prestigious 15 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art.

Surrounded by projected lights and swirls of color, viewers at the Yale Gallery move in semi-darkness from one framed Opus to the next. Flickering whorls and colors radiate from Lumia Suite, Op. 158 (1963-64), restored collaboratively by Yale and MoMA. This and Wilfred’s other late-life compositions were programmed to develop—like the cosmos itself—over long spans of time, even indefinitely. His vision is well served in this transcendent exhibition.