Eugene Epstein shows off the nuts-and-bolts mechanism that’s behind one of artist Thomas Wilfred’s phantasmagoric lumia.

The Astronomer Who Found the Light

By Michael Rogers

As a young astronomer, Eugene Epstein ’56 spent hours investigating what the far reaches of the universe might look like. With powerful radio telescopes, and the appropriate calculations, he could create reasonably good representations of the luminous wonders in space. Yet Epstein maintains that the first time he saw anything that really astounded him was at an art museum, where he eyed a strange item that resembled a cosmos in a box. His encounter with that object would develop into a lifelong passion that would enable a once-obscure artist to regain major museum recognition.

It was 1960, and Epstein, then a graduate student at Harvard, was visiting the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on a weekend trip to New York City. Wandering through the galleries, he stumbled on a work of art unlike anything he had ever seen before: an illuminated box, a bit smaller than a medicine cabinet, and set into a wall. Hazy wisps of colors resembling the aurora borealis drifted slowly down the dark screen like a hypnotic, abstract ballet.

“When I turned the corner and saw this work, it blew me away,” says Epstein. “I thought, ‘Wow! Where has this been all my life?’ I watched so long that I ended up sitting on the floor. It was captivating.” The work was called Vertical Sequence II, Opus 137, and its title plate listed the artist as Thomas Wilfred. Epstein had never heard of him, which was not surprising, since even among art experts of the day, Wilfred was largely unknown. The work itself could have been described as psychedelic, except that Wilfred had created it in 1941, long before the term was even coined. Epstein had to know more about the artist. A museum staff member told him that Wilfred ran a nonprofit organization called the Art Institute of Light, in West Nyack, up the Hudson River from Manhattan, and gave him the address. Back at Harvard, Epstein wrote to him and asked if he could buy one of his works. Wilfred wrote back offering to sell him one for about $3,000, which was beyond the means of a graduate student.

Epstein got his PhD in 1962, and then took a job in El Segundo, California, as a radio astronomer with the Aerospace Corporation. Fortified by a regular paycheck, he wrote again to Wilfred, but this time Wilfred responded that he had nothing available to sell. Nothing if not persistent, two years later Epstein wrote again. This time Wilfred offered to create for him one of his “lumia” compositions, although by now the price had jumped to $4,000. They struck a deal and in early 1965, Wilfred sent Epstein Sequence in Space, Opus 159—a small work featuring a range of colors and intensities.

For most people, that would have been the end of the story. For Epstein, it was just the beginning. Collecting ran in the family: his father, Louis, had channeled his lifelong interest in books into the establishment of the Pickwick Bookshop, a legendary Hollywood bookstore that had grown into a flourishing Southern California chain before Epstein Sr. sold it to B. Dalton in 1968.

Eugene was never interested in the book trade, but by the age of 12 he had become hooked on astronomy. While visiting the Griffith Observatory’s planetarium with a friend, Epstein says that he was “bowled over by the whole subject. I knew almost immediately that this was what I wanted to study for the rest of my life. I went back month after month. As a teenager, I joined the L.A. Astronomical Society. I made my own telescopes. It became obvious that Caltech was the place to go for college. I applied and went in the fall of 1952. I think it was the only school I applied to.”

Epstein was one of only two astronomy majors in his class, and he found mentors in Caltech astronomer Jesse Greenstein and physicist Robert Leighton ’41, PhD ’47 (both now deceased). He was still a freshman when Leighton invited him to go on an observing run at Mount Wilson. “He was doing time-lapse photography using a 16-millimeter camera with the 60-inch telescope looking at Saturn and Mars. He let me do the guiding. For a kid 18 years old, that was a real treat.”

After Caltech, Epstein spent six years at Harvard. After he arrived, the university’s radio telescope was equipped with a new device called a maser, which amplified radio waves and helped astronomers study emissions from objects that would otherwise have been too faint to detect. Using this instrumentation, Epstein became one of the first astronomers to measure the atomic hydrogen content of distant galaxies. Then he went to work for the Aerospace Corporation, formed in 1960 to oversee space and missile programs for the U.S. Air Force. The company decided to do radio astronomy research because it felt that the investment in basic research would help drive its development of computer-controlled antennas, high-frequency microwave equipment, and sensitive electronic receivers. “Naturally,” says Epstein, “they realized that they needed a radio astronomer, too.”

Epstein spent his entire career at Aerospace, helping run the company’s radio telescope and conducting his own research, which included measuring the thermal emission from the surface of Mercury and the rings of Saturn and studying the variability of the radio emission from quasars. He also helped build the company’s spectral line receiver, used by many outside astronomers, including Anneila Sargent, PhD ’77 (currently Caltech’s Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Astronomy and director of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy), who used the receiver to study star-forming regions in the Milky Way galaxy. But by the 1980s, Aerospace was no longer emphasizing radio astronomy, so for a few years he managed a “photon bucket” project and then worked on “Star Wars”-related projects. In 1989, when he was 55, he took early retirement. At an age at which many people start second careers, Epstein returned to his fascination with Wilfred.

A lumia from one of Wilfred’s early machines, which he called a clavilux.

Tripping the Light Fantastic

The aesthetic pull that Wilfred’s work exerted on Epstein seems to support the old adage that opposites attract. Epstein is articulate to the point of garrulousness and exudes nervous energy. Wilfred, by all accounts, fit the Ingmar Bergman-esque stereotype of the withdrawn, stoic, even sullen Scandinavian.

Born in Denmark in 1889, Thomas Wilfred studied art and, in 1905, while supporting himself as a concert-hall singer and lute musician, began tinkering with crude devices that would project light through colored glass. He eventually moved to New York, and by 1921 he finished building a rather large apparatus that triggered an array of colored lights projected on a screen. Wilfred called the apparatus a “clavilux” and coined the term “lumia” to describe the compositions in light he created with it.

Around 1930, he made his first small, self-contained lumia instrument. It plugged into the wall and continuously showed one of his lumia. Others followed, each featuring different colors and patterns. Despite the intricate displays, the lumia instruments were made from fairly mundane, even primitive, parts—a standard unfrosted light bulb; a set of lenses; a disk of glass that Wilfred had painted in various colors revolving above the light bulb; a simple motor that caused the disc and lens wheel to turn; another motor that slowly moved the bulb; and carefully shaped aluminum surfaces that reflected the light onto a screen. These inner workings were locked in wooden boxes, usually hidden behind a wall, so that viewers saw only the light show, projected on the screen.

In a 1947 essay published in The Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, Wilfred wrote that his aim had been to create an entirely new art form “in which the artist’s sole medium of expression is light.” With more than a bit of bombast, he added, “The lumia artist conceives his idea as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.” A handful of museums, including MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bought one or two of the phantasmagoric lumia for their collections. Other artists, either influenced by Wilfred or acting independently, experimented with light art in various incarnations, creating an extremely specialized niche within modern art. But art experts generally acclaim Wilfred as the maestro of the medium. It’s uncertain exactly how many lumia he made, but many of them probably would have ended up in dumpsters if it hadn’t been for Epstein and another one of his chance encounters.

Wilfred Goes to Washington

In 1964, Donna Stein, a graduate student from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, came out to Los Angeles for the summer. She met Epstein, and the two dated for a while. “I was trying to figure out what to do for my master’s thesis, and Eugene told me about Wilfred,” says Stein, now an art historian and independent curator living in Pasadena. When she returned to New York she checked out the Wilfred piece at MoMA and, like Epstein, was fascinated. Her adviser arranged for her to meet one of MoMA’s curators at the museum, who, upon hearing that Stein was interested in Wilfred, told her, “He’s downstairs. Let me introduce you.” It turned out that Wilfred was at the museum checking up on his art work.

“By the time I met Wilfred, he was embittered,” says Stein. He believed that the art cognoscenti had largely dismissed his work as frivolous. “From the 1940s to the 1960s, Wilfred labored in obscurity,” a situation not helped by what Stein calls his “astringent personality. He was very quiet and shared very little with me.”

Stein’s thesis would eventually evolve into the first and only retrospective ever held of Wilfred’s work, but the artist was no longer alive by the time the show opened, in the spring of 1971, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., traveling later that year to MoMA. He had died in 1968. Through extensive detective work, Stein tracked down 19 lumia for the exhibition. “I’m not sure that any others exist,” she says. “Some were lost.”

By now Stein had become a Wilfred resource for Epstein, providing him with the names of the owners of all the existing lumia. “After the Corcoran show, Eugene started buying them up, keeping after collectors or museums that no longer wanted them, either because they had forgotten what they were, or because they had become too difficult to maintain,” Stein says. Over the next 30 years, Epstein acquired eight Wilfred lumia and became the world’s leading collector of this unique art form.

He’d keep in touch with other lumia owners, and when they were ready to sell, he was there to buy. “One thing led to another and it became kind of a mission,” he says. It seems natural to ask why the technically oriented Epstein didn’t just build some of his own light boxes, since they look easy to assemble. He’s heard that question before, he says, and, as always, he bristles at the idea.

“I can hit the keys of a piano, but I can’t play the piano,” he says. “I’m not an artist. It never occurred to me to try my hand at creating a lumia composition even though I have a mechanical bent and have built things like telescopes. How many people have looked at a Jackson Pollock painting and thought of buying some cans of paint and trying to paint one themselves? I have no interest in trying to top a master.”

In 1993, Epstein and his wife, Carol, decided that their traditional-looking home in West Los Angeles didn’t fit their growing interest in contemporary art. So they razed it to build a concrete and glass Modernist-style house whose white interior walls display works that the couple has collected over the years by such famous contemporary artists as James Rosenquist and David Hockney. It was Carol’s idea to give the Wilfreds a special place in the home’s lower-level den, where they occupy an entire wall and can be switched on and off by a remote-control device that Epstein adapted for the purpose.

No two lumia are alike. Some look like burning fires, while others, darker in texture and hue, almost resemble murky liquids. Because the disks and lights revolve at different rates, more than a year can elapse before each light show repeats itself exactly. (Epstein says that Wilfred calculated these durations using a simple formula that involves multiplying the reciprocals of the time periods of the revolving parts.) Although just a few minutes of viewing are enough to discern general patterns in each lumia, during an interview for this article Epstein sat transfixed, watching a display as if he were seeing it for the first time.

Epstein displays a collection of catalogs from recent museum shows that have exhibited one or more of his Wilfred lumia.

Keeper of the Flame

Once Epstein became a major Wilfred collector, his life took on an added dimension. In 2003, he launched a website on Wilfred, providing information on the artist and images of the lumia. In recent years, this has become a more important role, as Wilfred’s work has gradually been rediscovered by museums. While Epstein was not responsible for this development, he has eagerly shared his Wilfreds and his knowledge of the work with art institutions. The Wilfred revival began in 1999, when a museum in Wilfred’s native Denmark put together a show of light artists and included two of Epstein’s Wilfreds. Other shows exhibiting his Wilfreds followed, including one co-organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, another at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and yet another at the Liverpool branch of London’s Tate Museum, which was suitably entitled Summer of Love, Art of the Psychedelic Era. Later this year, Epstein will send lumia to exhibits in Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, and Vienna. Wherever the lumia go, Epstein goes too: his arrangements with the art institutions provide for him to fly out to unpack the works and inspect them for transit damage. He is also available to make any necessary repairs; and, as Epstein says, “We stay for the opening parties.”

Epstein has also come in for his share of credit for advancing the artist’s reputation, not least, according to two recent pieces in the Los Angeles Times, for his ability to keep the increasingly antique lumia in working order. Hirshhorn curator emerita Judith Zilczer singles him out for playing “a crucial role in preserving Wilfred’s major works and in promoting wider understanding of his art.”

Epstein says that, most importantly, he is gratified to see that the recent shows have brought Wilfred the critical acclaim that largely escaped him during his lifetime. In a review of the Hirshhorn show in the Wall Street Journal, art critic Matthew Gurewitsch wrote, “In the long-forgotten . . . Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968), the curators have resurrected a true visionary. The ‘sculpted light’ . . . rivals the Northern lights in fascination and surpasses them in variety and intensity of colors, evoking rainbow X-rays of living creatures, the dissolution of drops of jewel-toned inks in a glass of water, the spiraling of nebulae through the cosmos. Maybe even stranger, the light can seem to liquefy or turn to dust, then to congeal into substances you feel you could reach out and touch.”

Why the sudden surge of interest in Wilfred? “A lot of younger artists are working in kinetic media and when you look at a Wilfred, you see where they started from,” Stein says. “The beauty of his work has been consistent. It has elegant, refined imagery and sophisticated use of color with the simplest of means. What comes out in front rises above the technical aspects.”

Although Epstein met Wilfred only a couple of times and never felt that he got to know him, they did correspond and speak occasionally. “He knew that I was an astronomer and he respected me as a scientist,” Epstein says. “In one letter Wilfred wrote about one of his works, ‘I’m trying to imagine what a space traveler might see while journeying between the stars.’”

Could Epstein’s early attraction to light shows in space account for his affinity for Wilfred’s work? “At some gut level,” he says, “there’s got to be some connection. As an astronomer, I was visually oriented. I have said that some of the lumia images look like a solar prominence or a cloud of gas and dust in a star-forming region. Some of the shapes resemble images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.”

Still, Epstein prefers a simpler explanation, saying, “It’s a visceral experience. Would any astronomer be more interested in this? I don’t know.” He recalls inviting over to his house the late planetary scientist and brilliant science popularizer Carl Sagan. He led Sagan, a longtime friend, into his den, dimmed the lights, and turned on a lumia, anticipating a suitable expression of aesthetic appreciation. “After five minutes,” recalls Epstein, the creator of Cosmos said, “Okay, I give up. How does it work?” Says Epstein, “I was certainly surprised at that. I thought he would just go with the flow.”