On June 16, 1934, New York Times journalist Edward Alden Jewell proclaimed, “What Thomas Wilfred has done, among other things of prime pioneering importance, is firmly and clearly establish this art of light.” In his article, Jewell was praising Denmark-born American artist, engineer, and inventor, Thomas Wilfred for his revolutionary Clavilux “color organ” for creating ephemeral, moving light abstraction performances. “For Lumia— the name [Wilfred] gives to his galvanizing new art form—represents, in my opinion,” Jewell writes, “as in that of others, one of the most significant [aesthetic] developments of our time.” Despite this and many other glowing reviews of Wilfred’s revolutionary work throughout the early 20th century, Wilfred and his Lumia have long been largely forgotten—until now.
After years of archival research and collecting, for the first time in almost 50 years, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has gathered 15 of the artist’s light compositions for its new retrospective, “Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light.” On view through Jan. 7, 2018, the exhibition offers a chronological exploration of Wilfred’s work complemented by photographs, performance advertisements, design plans, and notes detailing Wilfred’s creative and engineering processes.
“During his career from the 1920s through the 1960s, Wilfred revolutionized how artists and the public understood the creative possibilities of light and movement. But in the last half of the 20th century he disappeared almost entirely from public view,” said museum director Stephanie Stebich in a press release. "This exhibition introduces our audiences to this early practitioner of light art.”
While Wilfred began his career creating Lumia, or “light art” with his Clavilux performances around the world, by the late 1920s he had developed smaller, self-contained, television-like units to display his moving colored forms—reminiscent of the aurora borealis—for more intimate settings. To achieve this effect, Wilfred selected specific lamps—initially diagramming the filament configurations he needed for manufacturers to produce, until he found sufficient commercial options—and manipulated the light using metal, glass, mirroring techniques, and screens, and enclosing the assemblies in wooden cabinets. The resulting works are all unique in their color palettes—though Wilfred was vocal about his preference for bright hues—shifting patterns, and timed movement. For example, the red and yellow tones in a circular form in "Unit #50, Elliptical Prelude and Chalice" evoke an anatomical vasculature; whereas moments of intensifying blues in "Visual Counterpoint, Op. 140" instead resemble the movement and colors of a jellyfish underwater.
Though Wilfred continued to develop and evolve the Lumia until his death in 1968, the delicacy and finesse of the works have made conservation and restoration efforts challenging—a likely culprit of Wilfred's overlooked status as a formative avant-garde artist, despite his influence on contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, László Moholy-Nagy, and Katherine Dreier. Wilfred's best-known piece, "Lumia Suite, Op. 158" was on display at the Museum of Modern Art for almost two decades until its need for maintenance led to its being disassembled in 1980, indefinitely.
In an effort to protect the artist’s legacy, Lumia collectors Eugene and A.J. Epstein, an uncle and nephew duo, have stockpiled hundreds of comparable incandescent lamps, which are being discontinued by manufacturers. (Eugene first came across Wilfred’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, and later bought his first Lumia in 1965 for “roughly the same cost as a new Corvette,” he says.) Additionally, many of the artwork's mechanisms have deteriorated over time, making the mere operation of the Lumia a taxing effort for the integrity of the pieces. To protect the Lumia on display for the Smithsonian exibition, some of the pieces have been programmed to run only a few times per hour. In spite of these challenges, “Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light” succeeds in demonstrating the artist's impressive feat of manipulating light and form in the pre-digitial age.
“This exhibition of Thomas Wilfred's light sculptures offers the museum a wonderful opportunity to share the work of one of the earliest artists to use light as a medium, complementing our time-based media collection,” said curator Virginia Mecklenburg in the official press release. “Today lumia remain as transcendent as they were almost a century ago.”
“Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light” is on view from Oct. 6, 2017, through Jan. 7, 2018, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
