Len Lye: A Biography

LEN LYE: A BIOGRAPHY BY ROGER HORROCKS Roger Horrock's recently published biography of Len Lye presents an unusual and comprehensive take on Twentieth Century art. LEN LYE: A Biography tells the life story of an artist who was able to transcend the typical neuroses that afflicted modernist artists (plus loss, poverty, war, and exile) to produce a diverse body of paintings, films, sculptures, and writing. This book is almost a complete story of Twentieth Century art in Europe, America, and the South Pacific. It covers modernism, primitivism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism and takes us beyond modern sculpture. Lye's story is that of an artist taking his vision and inspiration out of New Zealand and finding a place for it in the art of the modern world. Even more important, when Lye hit his stride as an artist, in a few really great works, he managed to transcend and surpass the formal limitations in the work of most of his peers and successors. Lye, who became an American citizen in 1950, was born in New Zealand in 1901. Early in life Lye was presented with a great abyss to cross, the death of his father. The childhood that followed was one of movement, insecurity, foster homes, and difference. These experiences, which so easily could have crushed or twisted a developing personality, instead helped Lye develop a tough, self-sufficient interior life. Inspired by nature, light, and movement, Lye taught himself to draw and became interested in the processes of memory. Throughout his youth, Lye carried out systematic experiments and exercises to both strengthen his memory and liberate his thought processes. After leaving school with minimal qualifications Lye worked in a variety of jobs throughout New Zealand. These jobs included hop picking, labouring, and advertising. In his spare time Lye continued his study of painting and drawing and became aware of the modernist movement in European art and primitivism. At the age of 22, feeling that he had exhausted the possibilities of the New Zealand art scene, Lye moved to Sydney, Australia and immersed himself in the bohemian circles of that city. Continuing to pursue his personal study of art, Lye discovered psychoanalysis, film animation, and early examples of kineticism. In 1924 Lye returned to New Zealand, then decided to extend his study of tribal art by first-hand study of Polynesian culture. Lye traveled to the South Pacific islands of Fiji, Rarotonga, Tonga, and Samoa, where he stayed for several months, getting to know some locals, becoming involved with local culture and learning something of their art making processes. Following his sojourn in the South Pacific, Lye returned to Sydney where his increasing desire for knowledge fed his restless yearning for a direct connection with European modernism. In late 1926, Lye worked his way to England as a stoker on a steamship. Once in London, Lye quickly established himself within the vanguard art movements of that city and in 1927, drawing on his knowledge of Australian aboriginal and Polynesian art, commenced making images for the animated film Tusalava. Tusalava, a 9 minute long, black and white animation film, depicts the transformation of simple life forms into complex forms that grow, evolve, and are then consumed. After its completion in 1929 and subsequent screenings in London and some European film festivals, Tusalava established Lye's reputation as a film artist. Originally planned as the first part of a trilogy, Lye was never able to gain sufficient support to complete the Tusalava project as he initially envisaged it. But, as a poetic film made at the very boundary of Lye's understanding of art and cinema, the themes of Tusalava perplexed Lye for the rest of his life. Again and again, Lye reinvestigated these themes in various batiks, paintings, writing, and theory. Over the next few years Lye reveled in London's cosmopolitan artistic community, explored associative writing and drawing techniques, produced a series of original book covers for writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Robert Graves, then, in 1931, published No Trouble, a book of his letters. …