Squaring the Circle Wilfred’s Lumia and his Rejection of ‘Colour Music’

Lambert, Nick (2019) Squaring the Circle Wilfred’s Lumia and his Rejection of ‘Colour Music’. In: Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl: The Musicalization of Art. Bloomsbury Collections, pp. 149-166. ISBN 978-1-5013-3013-1 (hardback) 978-1-5013-3016-2 (online) 978-1-5013-3014-8 (epdf)

Abstract

This chapter will explore Thomas Wilfred’s relation to music in his self-defined art form of ‘lumia’, and compare him to contemporaries including the abstract animator Mary Ellen Bute (1906–83) and Oskar Fischinger (1900–67), as these two artists were the most successful and visible proponents of visual music in mid-twentieth-century America. They went on to influence a number of significant successors in the field, not least the pioneers of early computerized animation, James and John Whitney. Fischinger also influenced the young John Cage, whilst Wilfred had some impact on Jackson Pollock and was exhibited alongside him at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

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