Music for the Eyes

Forty-two years ago, a young astronomy student took a stroll through New York’s Museum of Modern Art that changed his life. Then a graduate student at Harvard, Eugene Epstein had been to New York a few times before, and when he walked into the museum that day, he certainly wasn’t expecting to be so thoroughly seduced by a single work of art.

“Wow,” is the word Epstein remembers saying as he discovered a secluded alcove where a cabinet displayed a light show of slow-moving, startlingly beautiful colors. “Wow” is the word the now-retired 67-year-old radio astronomer repeats often when he talks about Thomas Wilfred’s art, of which he has become perhaps the world’s most avid collector.

On that day in 1960, utterly struck, Epstein stood in front of “Vertical Sequence II, Opus 136,” 1941, for about two hours. Then he raced to the museum’s information desk to find out who Wilfred was.

Call it love, call it fate, but what Epstein experienced that day is the kind of spark that occurs when a true collector meets something that matches his or her need for passion. Be it for stamps, vintage cars or artworks, when that fire is lighted, it takes its own form, often becoming what to anyone else would seem pure obsession but to the collector is just part of what gives meaning to life. For Epstein, the commitment to a single artist’s work has been unrelenting.

The Danish-born musician-turned-artist who had developed elaborate theories of making silent music with light was a respected, if somewhat forgotten, artist when Epstein came upon his work. Over the years, the artist had experienced his share of cultist popularity, primarily by presenting his work at theaters throughout the world--from Hollywood High School’s auditorium (in 1924) to Carnegie Hall. His work also had been collected by the likes of Clare Boothe Luce and admired by the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski. But Wilfred was always a bit isolated by the uniqueness of his ideas.

Wilfred, then 71 and living in suburban New York, was responsive to Epstein when the young man wrote asking to buy a work, but the prices were too high for a student’s budget. Five years later, by which time the young astronomer was living in L.A., employed and financially able to buy, Wilfred agreed to sell him a piece and to meet him. It took a few months to deliver, and in the process the two corresponded. By the time Wilfred died, in 1968, they had seen each other twice and had numerous telephone conversations.

Little did Wilfred know that Epstein would be the one to carry his flame into the next century. Wilfred is hardly known at all today, but if the artist seems a thing of the past to most people, you wouldn’t know it from talking to Epstein.

On the lower floor of the three-story Modernist Westside home designed by architect Jim Harlan that Epstein shares with his wife, Carol, an entire gallery-like wall is devoted to Wilfred’s work. In this quiet, meditative retreat, Epstein spills out stories he has learned of Wilfred’s life in a torrent of anecdotes and facts, his enthusiasm for the work and his curiosity about the man unabated by the passage of time.

In a world preoccupied by passing fancies, Epstein’s passion for Wilfred is hard even for him to explain; he is drawn to the images and the slow pace of the changing imagery. “Imagine an artist having on her palette the shapes, forms, colors, and intensity range seen in some of the spectacular Hubble Space Telescope images of clouds of interstellar dust and gas. The artist creates a slow, peaceful, sublimely beautiful, almost-imperceptibly evolving sequence of such images that goes on for hours.”

Epstein owns nine works by the artist; each of which he lovingly tracked down and whose mechanical parts he often had to restore himself, sometimes with substantial effort. Wide-ranging in their effects, the mechanisms are encased in cabinets and hidden from view and are all quite simple: Each one consists of one or more lightbulbs, a handcrafted color wheel and a series of carefully shaped moving reflectors that sculpt the continuously evolving colored emissions.

Even if Wilfred’s works, which he dubbed “Lumia,” were not so beautiful, so strangely ethereal in their rotation of colors and shapes, Epstein’s enthusiasm would be hard to resist. As he shows a visitor each piece, using a rudimentary Radio Shack remote control to operate the machinery, he stops regularly to express his awe at what is unfolding in light projections on ground-glass screens.

Since the ever-rotating imagery of each work can take weeks to go through a full cycle, revelations come with regularity as one watches the work. Each piece is different in palette and form. They can look roughly like flickering fire, the light show of the aurora borealis or perhaps what one might imagine an abstract, Color Field painting would look like if the colors were in constant fluctuating motion. “Eugene’s devotion to maintaining the pristine quality of the mechanism and presentation of Wilfred’s work is to be congratulated,” says Stephanie Barron, vice president for education and public programs and senior curator of Modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Artists are really lucky to have someone like that.”

The match of Wilfred and Epstein would seem to be a perfect pairing of collector and material, with no suggestion of being market-driven. Even in the art world, the work is hardly known--the Museum of Modern Art’s three pieces have been out of sight and in storage since the mid-1980s, and other works by Wilfred are rarely seen. Epstein has occasionally lent works to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and to museums in Europe. He says his ambition is to renew the art world’s interest in the work and to find a permanent home for his collection to land in some day.

What it is in the work that has so deeply and lastingly impressed Epstein might seem to be its ethereal astronomical qualities--the collector spent his career as a radio astronomer and research scientist at Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo.

Yet Epstein says his devotion stems only from the quality of Wilfred’s work: “To me it was a just purely aesthetic, gut response to abstract beauty,” he insists. This in spite of the fact that Wilfred wrote an essay in 1956 titled “Musing on the Spheres,” a meditation on man’s ability to envision the universe in which he mentions radio telescopes, Epstein’s primary professional tool.

When pointed to that article, Epstein only laughs and denies knowledge of it. “Did he really write that?” he asks. The scientist discounts any comparisons between the clinical nature of his scientific work and the art. “I think that my work gave me a verbal analysis,” he says, “a way to describe it to somebody. But I think the aesthetic just reached some sensibility. I like it, pure and uncomplicated, unintellectual.”

When Epstein sought out Wilfred, the artist had become reclusive and even a bit bitter at being left outside by the mainstream art world of Abstract Expressionism, and he was full of conspiracy theories about why he wasn’t bigger. “He was very suspicious of the art world and the art market,” Epstein remembers.

The two met at the Modern Museum in Manhattan, and the artist gave his fan a behind-the-artwork tour. “He felt that people didn’t want him to be well known. I have to assume that because he took me inside the room that housed the mechanism, that he must have had confidence that I appreciated the artwork. I regarded it as being allowed into the inner sanctum.”

When Wilfred died, he had not yet had a retrospective exhibition--that would come three years posthumously, in 1971, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. But his Rube Goldberg kind of machinery is delicate and can be very demanding. Like much video and film art that has become a regular component of museum collections today, Wilfred’s work requires dedicated darkened rooms and asks the viewer for long-term attention, requirements that don’t make the work easy to place in public institutions.

Although the titles of the works often refer to spatial realms-- “Multidimensional,” “Sequences in Space”--Epstein affectionately refers to them by nicknames that he and his wife have invented: “Broom Closet,” because that’s where “Multidimensional” used to reside before it found its current placement; “Big Boy,” for its size.

Carol Epstein, a volunteer at LACMA for 22 years, joins her husband as he talks about the work, and it’s clear that in their retirement, tracking down works has become one of the pleasures of travel. She’s also indulged the works’ taking over their lives--before they built their current home, the pieces resided in every nook and cranny--and she has done much of the informal naming of the works. The Wilfred gallery wall of their home was her idea; a simple white facade with windows for the works, it hides their mechanisms in a utility room behind the wall.

To the eye of a Wilfred scholar, the installation works. “I think Wilfred would have been very pleased,” says Donna Stein, the artist’s biographer who curated the Corcoran exhibition. Stein became interested in Wilfred through her friendship with Eugene Epstein in the 1960s. An art historian and independent curator, Stein speaks with respect for the astronomer-collector-historian with no formal art degrees, and marvels at the fact that in his home one can see such a range of Wilfred’s work, dating from 1930 until the artist’s death in 1968.

“Eugene’s deeply into the research. I did the first work, but he’s taken it a great deal further. He’s made a point of trying to figure out what’s going on, as much as anything to see where they are and to buy them. It is a total passion.”