Dockum Mobilcolour performance at the Guggenheim museum

The first half of the previous century was a golden age for the colour organ. A variety of artists each made their own version of the apparatus with which it was possible to ‘compose’ elegantly with colour. Moving images of this fragile play with light are however very hard to find, which makes this recording of a performance by Charles Dockum (1904-1977) a very rare document. His Mobilcolor machine was commissioned by Hilla Rebay of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (Guggenheim Foundation). It was an attempt to compete with a similar machine made by Thomas Wilfred: the Lumia in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A film conservation by the Centre of Visual Music, Los Angeles.