Color Organs

As abstract painting evolved, the musical ideal sparked a movement to incorporate an element of increasing importance for the new century: time. “Color music,” “mobile color,” or “lumia” emerged as vanguard composers, musicians, and painters from both sides of the Atlantic developed a new art of projected light that advanced efforts of the previous two centuries to connect light to music. Using various combinations of colored lenses, handpainted disks, prisms, mirrors, filters, and projectors, these innovators built complex machines called color organs (due to the practice of using a soundless keyboard to control the spectrum of light) that projected abstract compositions of color and light. For artists including Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Charles Dockum, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, these machines liberated color from static form, detached form from representation, imbued space with temporality, and allowed visual art freedoms that advocates of abstraction had always attributed to music.

Color organs brought visual art closer to the nature of musical performance. Some artists imagined that their color organs would interpret music and intended for them to be played with orchestral accompaniment, creating an important forerunner to later multimedia performance. Others artists, such as Thomas Wilfred, rejected accompaniment altogether, believing that his “lumia” constituted a “silent visual music.” Whether accompanied by music or not, most color organs displayed moving colored lights on flat screens in concert halls or other public venues, merging the theatricality of musical performance with the two-dimensionality of painting to produce a hybrid kinetic art.