Thomas Wilfred was a Danish-born artist who immigrated to the United States in 1916 to pursue his vision of using electric light as a medium of art making. Wilfred’s fascination with light began early in childhood while playing with prisms. The Danish-American would go on to become a pioneering light artist and, like Edison and Tesla, an inventor whose work helped shape the American lighting industry. Wilfred’s career began many years after Edison and Tesla and differed from them in key ways. He was a licensed electrician, by trade, and driven more by artistic and ethereal pursuits. He was among the first to consider the qualitative and expressive experience of electric light on people.
Thomas Wilfred’s research notes show his early understanding of how light color influences human biology and mood, and how it can be used to cultivate alertness, calm or passion. In 1947, Wilfred wrote an essay in the Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism titled, “Light and the Artist,” in which he recounts the origins of light as art, “The recorded history of light art began one starry night on the island of Samos when Pythagoras stood contemplating the majestic rhythm of heavenly bodies moving in their orbits, appearing to him as a cosmic harmony.”1
Settling in New York City, Wilfred made a living as a mechanic, electrician and by doing gigs as a lutenist and singer of Danish folk songs. Orgeman writes that, “In 1918, he [Wilfred] 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.” In 1921, he began working on a device, which he named the “Clavilux,” meaning “light played by key” in Latin. The light box is an organ-like instrument with sliding controls that projects light.
The Clavilux would soon evolve into a portable product devised for the household called the Clavilux Junior, also known as the First Home Clavilux. A cross between a strobe light and a digital fireplace, the device could create stunning compositions of light while also serving as a decorative object for the modern household, with its opaque screen, wood-veneered casing and Art Deco chromium-plated hinges. It was designed to function like a home-theater unit before the invention of the television. The Clavilux’s operator could adjust two sets of controls: first, the selection of the composition, of which there were as many as a half dozen variations (“opuses” in Wilfred’s term), and, second, modulation of tempo, color intensity and brightness. These settings were adjusted by turning the knobs on what Wilfred called “the remote control,” a device attached to the cabinet by a cord. In many ways, the invention anticipates the modern DMX decoder or RGB remote.2
Before the Hubble or James Webb Space Telescopes, black-and-white photographs of nebulae captivated those inspired by the wonder of astronomy and the vastness of the cosmos. The 1920s saw a surge in popular astronomy. In 1928, the Scientific American began to publish regular columns called “The Backyard Astronomer,” in response to “an increasing demand among its readership for instruction on how to build homemade reflecting telescopes. Wilfred himself had a fascination with the stars and even described his Clauvix invention as, “… the ability to transform [environments] into the cabin of a fantastic dream ship capable of traveling through space with the speed of thought.” A playful allusion to the speed of light.3
In 1933, Wilfred gave a lecture at the formal opening of the Art Institute of Light and set forth his most philosophical statements on the subject of light as art, suggesting that “the phenomenon of light as embodied by Earth’s sun was life-sustaining, spirit-lifting and ever-present.” Wilfred saw the trajectory of sunlight as “traveling along curved paths (as Einstein’s theory of the curvature of light had made widely known), responding to objects and scattering at different angles across the Earth.” Similarly, he suggested, to the way in which the rays that emanate from the Clavilux Junior take on the screen’s shape, in this case as a result of curvature rather than the physical bending of light by gravity.
In his drawings and notes, Wilfred illustrates several light bending techniques. In these three configurations, the path of light is notated by the dotted lines, where light travels from one or more bulbs through a curved mirror. From there the light bounces onto a screen, yielding various moving shapes.
Wilfred became one of the first artists in America to speak of light as art and went on to coin the term “lumia” to describe “an eighth art” in which light would stand on its own as an expressive art form. In Light and the Artist, Wilfred notes that “Form, color and motion are the three basic factors in lumia, as in all visual experience, and form and motion are the two most important.”4
In 1963, MoMA commissioned Wilfred to create an installation for the museum’s thirty-fifth anniversary. Building a large-scale Lumia device designed for public viewing, Wilfred produced what many consider his masterpiece, Lumia Suite, Opus 158. Installed in a custom dark-gray room, the piece featured rear-projected moving light viewed from benches positioned directly in front of the screen. It quickly became a public favorite, running almost continuously for seventeen years.5
Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.
When MoMA closed its galleries for a major expansion between 1981 and 1984, the work was dismantled and placed in storage. There it remained until December 2014, when the Yale University Art Gallery requested Lumia Suite for its 2017 exhibition Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light, which presented fifteen of his kinetic light works spanning 1928 to 1968.6
Photo: Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives.
Thomas Wilfred envisioned light not just as a utility, but as a living language capable of shaping perception, mood and meaning. Long before neuroscience confirmed light’s influence on human biology and decades before modern controls like DMX or color-tuning became commonplace in the lighting industry, Wilfred intuited what many of us in the lighting world now take as foundational truth: that light is an expressive medium, one that can guide emotion, expand imagination and alter the way we understand our place in the universe.
Source:
- Wilfred, T. 1947. “Light and the Artist.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (4): 247. ↩︎
- Orgeman, Keely. Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017, 29. ↩︎
- Orgeman, Keely. Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017, 26. ↩︎
- Wilfred, T. 1947. “Light and the Artist.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (4): 252. ↩︎
- The Getty Conservation Institute, “Case Study: Snow,” in Keep It Moving? Conserving Kinetic Art, accessed December 9, 2025 ↩︎
- The Getty Conservation Institute, “Case Study: Snow,” in Keep It Moving? Conserving Kinetic Art, accessed December 9, 2025 ↩︎
