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http://www.gis.net/~scatt/clavilux/clavilux.html
Thomas Wilfred Richard Edgar Løvstrøm
born June 18, 1889, Næstved, Denmark
died June 10, 1968, Nyack, New York, USA
Light is the artist's sole medium of expression. He must mold it by optical means, almost as a sculptor models clay. He must add colour, and finally motion to his creation. Motion, the time dimension, demands that he must be a choreographer in space.
Thomas Wilfred
Danish-born Thomas Wilfred came to America as a singer of early music, and got involved with a group of Theosophists who wanted to build a color organ to demonstrate spiritual principles. Wilfred called his color organ the Clavilux, and named the artform of color-music projections "Lumia." He stressed polymorphous, fluid streams of color slowly metamorphosing. He established an Art Institute of Light in New York, and toured giving Lumia concerts in the United States and Europe (at the famous Art Deco exhibition in Paris). He also built "lumia boxes," self-contained units that looked rather like television sets, which could play for days or months without repeating the same imagery."
The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made it Possbile
William Moritz
"Thomas Wilfred's lumia - his term for kinetic color projections - stand as the earliest surviving color music about which we can make fair aesthetic judgements. Wilfred turned from a flourishing career as a singer to creating color music under the influence of the American architect Claude Bragdon, who relentlessly propogandized for Theosophy and the fourth dimension. Bragdon himself had experimented with color organ mechanisms and large visual music spectacles, such as the "cathedral without walls" in New York's Central Park in 1916, before patron Walter Kirkpatrick Brice offered to build a studio on Long Island where Bragdon and a society of Prometheans (color music visionaries) could labor at perfecting color music instruments. Wilfred gradually coopted the space and created his first clavilux - a console instrument for projecting lumia - there in close association with Bragdon in 1921."
Abstract Film and Color Music
PHOTO ABOVE: image from Clavilux
In 1922, Wilfred made his first public appearance with his Clavilux, hereby marking a concrete use of light for artistic purposes. ". . .on January 10th, 1922, I played my first public performance at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City; a tense and wonderful evening. But is was with fear and trembling I went out to buy the morning papers the next day. Years on the concert platform had taught me to take nothing for granted. It was quite possible I would have to spend many more years as a wandering troubadour with a crazy idea. The reviews were far better than I had dared to hope. In general the critics accepted lumia as a new art and made allowances for its youth and my inexperience at the keyboard. Kenneth MacGowan wrote in The World: 'This is an art for itself, an art of pure color; it holds its audience in the rarest moments of silence that I have known in a playhouse.' "
THOMAS WILFRED
Light and the Artist
Wilfred seated in front of Clavilux Jr.
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NOTE:
I had an opportunity to see his exhibition at the Cocoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC around 1917.
It was amazing.
.H.
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