In 1953, Frank Malina found himself at a crossroads. The renewal of his passport had been refused by the American embassy on the grounds that his activities were not contributing to the good image of the United States. The activities of Frank Malina were monitored – as were those of numerous scientists and intellectuals of the day – by the Senator McCarthy’s committee as part of his anti-communist witch hunt. Although Malina was never a supporter of the communist party, his abrupt turn towards an artistic career when he had a brilliant scientific career behind and ahead of him had attracted the attention of the McCarthy committee, which had decided to observe his activities. Thus obliged to remain in French territory, he decided to return to drawing, which he had already demonstrated aptitudes for as a child and had been doing until then in his spare time. He started by taking classes in oil painting with a painter named Reginald Weston and Vic Gray, a painter from the Académie Julian and a New Zealander. The subjects of his paintings and drawings are often borrowed from the fields of aeronautics, the sciences and traditional themes, such as the portrait or the game of chess. Among dozens of abstract drawings, a not negligible number are related to the abstract lyricism in vogue in the fifties. He also developed an interest in the theme of light, as evident in several drawings depicting filament light bulbs or people deflecting rays of light with a prism. In parallel, Frank Malina visited many galleries to feel the pulse of the Parisian art scene and try to present his work in the hope of having it exhibited. He did not like this ‘art game’, as he called it, but he managed to show his work for the first time at the Henri Tronche Gallery in the autumn of 1953, even though he had launched his career only 8 months earlier. He exhibited pieces made using painted strings and threads stretched within a frame against a coloured background. It was also an opportunity for him to look back on the development of his works in a text published after the exhibition. He was no longer happy with the successive backgrounds against which the figures stood out. He removed them and hung a cardboard cut-out of a knight from the game of chess in a frame. Then he removed the figure, contenting himself with painted threads strung across the frame: ‘The freedom he exhibits in the choice and use of substances and materials, the independence in space of his three-dimensional compositions, the aesthetic sensibility which oversees the choice of each element, the character of dynamic or cinematic tension which animates his work and the innovative audacity of his creations all merit particular attention.’ ¹ It was in these terms that the future orientation of his work towards the expression of movement that Georges Boudaille presented the exhibition, which was deemed, among other things, original and promising by critics. Malina explained that he had been influenced by his experience in technical design, with its straight lines and sensitivity to colour. Let us cite, for example, Cosmic Ray Shower, whose network of stretched strings recalls scientific photographs of cosmic rays captured in an artificially reproduced laboratory environment. This type of photo may be found in Gyorgy Kepes’ book The New Landscape in Art and Science, published in 1956. Let us note once again the theme of light in the piece titled Light Globe, which portrays a light bulb in painted string fixed to a grid composed geometrically and the motif of sinus waves used to represent electric current.

In the meantime, due to the lack of malleability of thread, he switched to wire, which he could twist and shape as he pleased while remaining nonetheless dependant on the line. His investigations led him to place a metal mesh meant to serve as a matrix for a painting and a support for the wires, threads and other strings: ‘The meshwork suggested a two-dimensional system capable of supporting the painting.’ ² The texture of enamel paint made it possible to block the mesh, thus creating spaces through which a painted background can be perceived. Frank Malina introduced the notion of movement, already latent in the dynamic tension of the strings stretched within the frame, by forcing the eye to go back and forth between the two planes. The following phase was the creation of pictures consisting of a succession of painted and cut-out meshes. Based on these meshwork pictures, Malina became aware of the moiré effect – that is, the moving forms sensed when the eye moves over two superimposed grids or when light passes over them. Moving Fields of Lines, dated 1954, was his first work featuring the moiré pattern. In the spring of 1954, as part of his quest for motion, he sought to accentuate the moiré patterns by placing a 50W light bulb behind one of his mesh compositions, but a plume of smoke which appeared behind the piece put a temporary end to his hopes of improving the moiré visual effect. It was not until months later that, around Christmas 1954, while contemplating a string of Christmas lights, that he understood his error: ‘How stupid I had been not to have thought of installing lamps of low wattage in the picture!’ ³ This artistic ‘eureka’ led him to put a string of Christmas lights behind a composition of superimposed painted meshes; the whole was then inserted in a wooden case – this time provided with holes for ventilation. ‘Illuminated wire mesh moiré’ is the name of his first work using electric light. During the first half of 1955, Malina concentrated his work on what he called, from then on, electropaintings.

In April, the major event in the history of kinetic art was ‘Le mouvement’ organised at the Denise René Gallery, where works by pioneers of kinetic art and such new, emerging artists as Soto, Bury and Vasarely were presented. At the same time, Malina made On and Off, his first work to introduce the suggestion of movement by means of thermal switches which made it possible to turn light bulbs on and off. In July of the same year, Frank Malina exhibited his electropaintings in three places in Paris, taking care to present a representative selection of his studies covering the preceding six months. First, he had an exhibition at the Comparaisons Salon with Henri Valensi’s musical ensemble. Two titles made reference to music: Flourish and Fugue in White Overtones. These two wire mesh collages were made shortly before his first electropainting, which indicates his desire to show the evolution of his investigations based on pivotal works in the development of his investigations. Next, he showed two works at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles: Colour Bars in Transformation, the last work before his first electropainting, and One + Two Triangles, an electropainting with blinking lights. It should be noted that Malina was not alone in presenting pieces which used electric light at the salon. Eusebio Sempere, from Spain, and his Cuban companion Lolo Soldevilla, presented, respectively, Relieve con Iluminación Positivo-Negativa and Relief Lumineux nº 1 et 2. We know only the piece by Sempere, which consisted of a wooden case whose back was perforated with four simple backlit geometric forms. A few years before, in 1951, Roger Desserprit made his geometric case sculptures containing a light bulb for accentuating the colours painted on a semi-transparent surface. Faced with the exorbitant costs of such works, Desserprit and Sempere very quickly stopped producing them. Only Sempere took up once again the construction of a few wooden sculptures consisting of a succession of biomorphic backlit strata in 1959 and 1961. But it was at the Allendy Gallery, as part of a personal exhibition from 6 to 9 July 1955, that Malina presented 19 electropaintings, two of which made use of the thermal switch system. In this way, he showed the public a panorama of his work which marked a turning point not only in his career, but in the history of the use of light in kinetic art in Paris. In contrast the efforts of his contemporaries to introduce light into artworks, Frank Malina’s great credit is that he systematised, beginning in 1954, the use of light in his artwork and persistently sought to improve the visual effects of his work by gradually integrating real motion. One of his major pieces from this period is titled Jazz. Alongside the musical reference, this piece is composed of 11 lamps which turn on aleatorically. There are 2048 possible combinations. It is thus almost impossible for a human being to see any one composition repeated twice in immediate succession.

Nevertheless, Frank Malina was not satisfied with the first effects he achieved; he wanted motion that was more complex and less quantifiable. A young student of electronics, Jean Villmer, who helped him in the conception of electric circuits, suggested that he use an electromechanical system consisting of a mobile part animated by an electric motor making possible a real continuous movement, and another, fixed part. Together, they developed the Lumidyne system, comprising a wooden backboard where light bulbs and the motor(s) is (are) fixed; a mobile component (a rotor), in painted Plexiglass connected to the motor by a rod; another fixed component also in painted Plexiglass (the stator); a diffusion screen, a diffusor; and, in his first Lumidyne pieces, one finds a mesh placed in front of the artworks. In the patent he filed in 1958, the system was described as a ‘picture whose appearance changes’. ⁴ The filing included a hand-drawn technical diagram dated 15 April 1956 showing a fragmented sketch of the succession of elements constituting the system. In the patent filing, Malina contented himself with a technical exposition and did not deal with the final framework the lumino-kinetic pictures were destined to and one thus gets the impression they might be used in a domestic context. Among his contemporaries, the engineer and artist Nicolas Schöffer had got ahead of Malina by several months, filing a patent for a system which projected beams of coloured light through spatio-dynamic sculptures which he had been making since the late forties. Schöffer’s devise was destined to be used exclusively collective and social ways, on very large surfaces: ‘These projections can be used in all sorts of spectacles as decoration, or may by themselves constitute a spectacle, in the cinema, in the application of architectural mural colouring, on interior or exterior surfaces, in all genres of advertising, in decoration, in sculpture, in the prolongation of the sight of a sculpture by its shadow projected in black, in grey or in colour, statically or in movement on all types of screens characterised in chapter 2 of the present descriptive record. These projections may also be conceived as part of mobile paintings of some sort.’ ⁵

Frank J. Malina, like an engineer constantly trying to improve his inventions, continued his investigations with the aim of achieving new visual effects. Notably, he developed a variant of the Lumidyne system by reassembling the diffusor and the stator into a single element, thus reducing the system to only three components. In this type of work, the design is cut out directly in the stator-diffusor in order to form a slit through which beams of light may pass. The first piece to adopt this system was Orbits VI. In 1963, he created his first piece based on a new system, dubbed Reflectodyne. As its name suggests, the system makes use of light reflected on a screen. Placed in a wooden case, columns of mirrors or metal fixed to axles connected to motors reflect beams of light onto a screen made of Plexiglass or frosted glass. In the 1958 patent filing, he had already mentioned the possibility of using reflecting surfaces such as crystals, mirrors or prisms to augment the gamut of visual effects. The effects achieved were similar to those produced by the Clavilux of Thomas Wilfred, a pioneer in the history of lumino-kinetic machines, even though the first time Malina saw one of Wilfred’s works was at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1959. The luminous forms achieved were light, ethereal and more complex. The following year, he created the Polaridyne system, in which the light is polarised through birefringant materials. The beams of light are deviated so as to create well-defined geometric forms.

During the first third of the 1960s, Frank Malina became so interested in the links between colour-light and sound that he commissioned two studies by Frank Popper and Claude Bergier on the aesthetic and psychological aspects of light and movement associated with sound, music or speech; and on instruments which produce both sounds and colour at once. Frank Malina established an account whose purpose was to explore the possibility of the mass production of audio-kinetic devices in partnership with Electro-Lumidyne International ⁶ and General Electric. These first investigations gave rise to two prototypes: ‘Chromie’ nº 1 and nº 2. In 1965, the first audio-kinetic work he completed, Entrechat I, was presented to the Furstenberg Gallery within the framework of a personal exhibition bringing together his artwork from the two previous years.

Due to his Czech origins, Malina had many ties with the country and the personal exhibition that opened at the Karlovo Náměstí Gallery in Prague in 1966 reminds us of the importance of certain figures – such as Zdeněk Pešánek with his work Kinetismus, published in 1944 – from Eastern Europe in the field of kinetic art. The first contacts with the exhibition’s curator, František Smejkal, were made in September 1964, when he visited Frank Malina at Boulogne-sur-Seine. F. Smejkal wanted to organise a retrospective exhibition including works from his kinetic period – that is, 1955–1966. In the end, the exhibition comprised 32 representative pieces spanning his entire career, including drawings dating to his official beginnings in the art world in 1953.

Beginning in 1967, Frank Malina became more and more involved in the creation of the journal Leonardo. Although his artistic production decreased, his presence at the important exhibitions devoted to kinetic art increased. His lifelong interest in the influence of movement and light on the psyche drew him back to the study of the aesthetic effects of moiré patterns. As a result, he made more Lumidyne pieces using the moiré effect in the seventies. Colour projections coupled with the reproduction of music had already been used in the course of the 19^th century to treat mental afflictions. It was thought that the fascination of movements and of music made it possible to capture the attention of patients and thus establish communication with them. This medical and psychological use was also proposed in one of the patents filed by Thomas Wilfred (under the pseudonym Richard Edgar Lovstrom), which Malina had a copy of which was dated 1925. He also learned of other examples of machines that produced moving coloured shapes when he patented his Lumidyne system in 1958. Some of the patents specified the positive psychological impact of motion on the psyche of people afflicted with mental or visual ailments. A few years later, in 1961, Malina visited the experimental psychologist Albert Michotte at the University of Louvain, where he was astonished to see that a machine based on the principle of the rotor and the stator used in the Lumidyne pieces was being used to study the reactions of subjects to different movements. The three-component works of art described above had a disquieting resemblance to Michotte’s disc machine.

Whether coupled with sound or not, science – in the form of technology and research into psychophysiology – is omnipresent in the history of the conception of lumino-kinetic machines. Its importance in Malina’s oeuvre goes beyond the simple stylisation of subjects issuing from the world of science; his approach itself is that of a researcher. It is enough to read his texts on the relationships between art and science to be convinced of this. For him, science’s ties with art were broken when the progress of science accelerated abruptly after the Renaissance. With the advent of photography, new links appeared, because the production of realistic images which had theretofore been the exclusive preserve of artists was challenged by science, thanks to the technical mastery of the process through which the world was documented exactly as one saw it on the basis of light. This theft on the part of the sciences of functions previously reserved to artists provoked not only an explosion of forms, but also a revision of the concept of form itself. On the other hand, if we recall Samuel Coleridge’s idea to the effect that beauty is unity in variety, it affirms that science shares a common goal in the quest to explain nature based on common laws. From this idea, it follows that the work of art is a synthetic expression of the diversity of human experiences; the capacity for expressing them should make it possible to ‘widen and deepen emotional perception of selected portions of man’s environment’. ⁷ Nonetheless, Frank Malina saw several differences which pertained to the scientific approach exclusively. A global view of his career shows us that these methods were not completely incompatible with artistic creation. Evoking his first attempts at introducing light into his work, he declared that, contrary to the dictates of reason, he imposed on himself a voluntary ignorance of the history of electricity in art, preferring an intuitive and personal approach – and yet taking stock of the results of past experience is the first stage prior to all research. At the beginning of 1968, he materialised this approach by launching Leonardo, a journal which celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, in 2007, and is present on the Internet in a version devoted to music (Leonardo Music). In its initial stages, Leonardo declared itself to be a forum open to changes in the fine arts, new materials and new technologies used by contemporary artists while remaining open to the contributions of other disciplines such as architecture, psychology, aesthetics, philosophy and physics. Malina thought that artists should not leave the task of explaining their work not solely in the hands of critics and art historians; instead, they should write about their work themselves. Leonardo was supposed to enable artists to open up their field of reflection to emergent artistic phenomena connected with new technologies.

Scientific research is generally carried out by work groups consisting of several researchers, as opposed to art, which is essentially an individual activity. Nonetheless, during his career, he surrounded himself with artists (Nino Calos, Vic Gray, Caloutsis…) and engineers (Jean Villmer, Didier Boucher, Dominique Bouffier…) to enlist their aid in constructing and perfecting his artworks. He preferred to surround himself with assistants rather than work in groups. ⁸ Experimentation is doubtless the main characteristic generally associated with the sciences. Similarly, Frank Malina should be seen as an experimenter investigating the precise and effective aesthetic impacts evinced by the diversity of technological procedures he used and the richness of the effects produced by his kinetic paintings. Basing himself on a work by Golovin, Frank Malina appropriated the idea that art and science fall within the province of a cybernetic model of the workings of the brain. In a fundamental way, the sciences organise nature on the basis of the laws humankind discovers and artists bring order to the chaotic vision which they have of their environment in a formal language which addresses itself to the senses. Golovin showed that scientists and artists reflect the functioning of their brains. The central nervous system is a memory-based self-regulating system which reacts to its environment in order to make sure it maintains its homeostasis. All the same, its biological limits oblige the organism to channel excessive information flows by regulating the data flow: 'This model suggests that the basic human intellectual propensity to study and understand the environnent, and to reduce its complexity by correlations and natural laves, may be no more than the necessary physical result of the need for a biological system to regulate itself adequately in an environnent so complex that the inflow of new data greatly exceeds the information channel capacity of its central nervous system. On the bases of this model, we can view the non-scientific varieties of creative activity, for example, as being biologically justified by need for play with the environnent undertaken by the organism essentially involuntarily, to help maintain its regulatory and information-processing system in an optimum operating condition.' ⁹Here, artistic activity is thus comparable to the sciences, whose legislative character makes it an instrument for modelling the world. In the end, so as to close the gap between art and science, Malina asked whether the function of aesthetics might not be to art what the search for universal laws is to science: ‘Is it possible to construct an aesthetic theory capable of predicting into the future the effect a work of art will have on people under anticipated conditions of life?’ ¹⁰ This is why, in the early days of Leonardo, aestheticians like Etienne Souriau and psychologists like Rudolph Arnheim and Richard L. Gregory were granted a place of such importance. His last Lumidyne paintings, dubbed ‘Kinetic-Op’ paintings, entailed a return to the moiré effect, thanks to the movements of superimposed screens that plunge the spectator into a state of contemplative fascination. The kinetic moiré-pattern pictures of his last period made it possible for Malina to imagine that one day a controllable system might be able to produce a programmed sensation.

Notes :

1 - Boudaille, Georges, L’actualité artistique, 24 October 1953.

2 - Malina, Frank J., ‘a few personal remarks’, published in a booklet along with press extracts and a text by Robert Vrinat, np.

3 - Malina, Frank J., ‘Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts : A Memoir’, Leonardo, vol. 8, no. 2, Oxford, Pergamon Press, summer 1975, p. 110.

4 - Malina, Frank Joseph, ‘Picture Whose Appearance Changes’. Patent no. 1.200.489. Requested in Paris on 26 June 1958. Issued on 29 June 1959. – Published on 22 December 1959.

5 - Schöffer, Nicolas ‘Optical Projection System and Device for Creating Mobile Projected Images’. Patent no. 1.168.155. Requested in Paris on 14 December 1956. Issued on 25 August 1958. – Published on 4 December 1958.

6 - A Company created by Malina in 1959 for the mass production and sale of the Lumidyne system.

7 - Malina, Frank J., ‘Some reflections on the differences between science and art’, Leonardo, vol. 1, no 4, Pergamon Press, october 1968, p. 450. (Text originally published in DATA (Direction in Art/Theory/Aesthetics) under the direction of Anthony Hill, London, Faber and Faber, 1965, p. 136).

8 - At the time, several groups of artists were formed – notably, in France, the GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel.

9 - Malina, Frank J., ‘Some reflections on the differences between science and art’, Leonardo, vol. 1, no 4, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1968, p. 451. (Text originally published in DATA (Direction in Art/Theory/Aesthetics) under the direction of Anthony Hill, London, Faber and Faber, 1965, p.138). Also in Golovin, N.E., ‘The Creative Person in Science.’ Under the direction of Taylor, C. W., and Barron, F. Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1963, p.12.

10 - Malina, Frank J., ‘Some reflections on the differences between science and art’, Leonardo, vol. 1, no 4, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1968, p. 454. (Text originally published in DATA (Direction in Art/Theory/Aesthetics) under the direction of Anthony Hill, London, Faber and Faber, 1965, p.143.)