In Christchurch, where Lye was able to board with Frank and Maud Cole (an uncle and aunt), he enrolled at the beginning of 1922 for evening and Saturday classes at the Canterbury College School of Art.1 He already knew its director, Archibald Frank Nicoll, who had taught an evening art class he had attended in Wellington while still a schoolboy. Nicoll took an interest in Lye. Born in Scotland in 1886, he was in many ways an artist of the same type and generation as Richardson, combining a thorough academic training with a commitment to the close observation of nature.2 His landscape paintings were close to Impressionism in their heightened emphasis on light and colour and their lively brushwork, but like Richardson he was best known as a portrait painter. University professors, governors and their wives, chief justices, and mayors ‘flowed smoothly’ onto his canvases.3 It was a measure of public taste that such portraits by Nicoll and Richardson enjoyed more recognition than their other work.
Nicoll was sufficiently impressed by Lye to give him one of his landscapes. And when the young artist found it difficult to adjust back to an orthodox art syllabus, Nicoll allowed him to spend his time making sketches of things in motion.4 Lye continued to practice this exercise, as shown by his note: ‘See the folds in those blankets pegged to the clothesline — well, when the breeze blows, so the fold goes, is gone, is back, and is always different at the bottom, sides hanging and flapping corners (make a pencil sequence in the sketchbook).’5 But drawings of blankets, water reflections, the shoulder muscles of horses, and other objects in motion bore so little relevance to what was being discussed at the school that he left after the first term.
Nicoll generously helped Lye to obtain a bread-and-butter job as an artist for the Christchurch Sun. The Sun (later absorbed into the Christchurch Star) pioneered the use of illustrations at a time when other New Zealand editors avoided them because they considered visual material frivolous and beneath the dignity of a serious newspaper.6 Lye put his craftsmanship to work, making careful line drawings though he sometimes experimented with a freer line (as in a sketch of two circus elephants which he later gave to Maud Cole). At the Sun he often thought about David Low the cartoonist who had worked for various Christchurch newspapers before moving on to the Sydney Bulletin and then to London. Lye was not interested in cartooning — he felt he ‘couldn’t caricature for sour apples’7 — but he was dying to travel.
While the official art scene in Christchurch held no surprises for him, the collection of ‘ethnological’ or ‘primitive’ art at the Canterbury Museum had a profound effect on his thinking. Opened in 1870, the museum held examples of Maori carving, Aboriginal art, tapa from the Pacific Islands, and indigenous designs from many other parts of the world, presented as anthropological exhibits rather than as works of art. Reading about modernism had alerted Lye to the new overseas interest in such art, particularly African carving, among sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Jacob Epstein. At the beginning of the century almost no one in European art circles had taken a serious interest in African work, but then (as Clive Bell noted in 1919) artists such as ‘Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and Vlaminck began picking up such pieces as they could find in old curiosity and pawn shops’.8 Then in England young artists started to visit ‘those long dreary rooms [in the British Museum] that once were abandoned to missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial soldiers enhancing their prestige by pointing out to stay-at-home cousins the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy’.9
To avant-garde artists, such work offered striking proof that there were powerful styles of representation that lay completely outside the traditional aesthetics of European art. Also, artists were impressed by the frank sexuality of some of this work and its ability to stir the subconscious mind. Here were images of sex, death, natural energy, and the spirit world that made the official Victorian masterpieces seem shallow and prudish by comparison. The modernists took the conventional terms ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ and gave them positive associations, in contrast to ‘civilisation’ — that favourite Victorian term — which they associated with the timidity and exhaustion of bourgeois art. This was a new reading of ‘primitive art’, paying serious attention to it as art, contemptuous of the attitudes of the ethnographer, who saw such objects merely as scientific exhibits in a museum, or of the coloniser, who saw them as spoils of empire, or of the collector, who saw them as exotic curiosities or souvenirs of travel. The objects the modernists valued most were those made prior to European contact; thus they cancelled out the idea of progress. There was a great feeling of relief in lifting aside the dead weight of Western civilisation to make space for other traditions and new discoveries. This is not to deny that the modernist approach created its own set of problems by imposing a cultural framework of its own and a new sense of exoticism. But we should not forget what a radical step it was in the early years of the century to be championing the work of indigenous peoples, for this activity challenged the public mystique of the British Empire and other European empires.
Lye was hugely excited by his first encounter with pictures of traditional African art: ‘I knew I was not a chip off the Western art block, I knew it in my bones.’10 He saw the carved figures as rich in implied movement, the work of artists acutely sensitive to stance and gesture. As Robert Farris Thompson has written: ‘African icons remain trésors de souplesse, in the memorable phrase of Jean Rouch, for traditional sculptors in West Africa seem more influenced by the vital body in implied motion, by forms of flexibility, than by realism of anatomy per se.’11 Lye found this work intriguing not only in terms of movement but more generally in its approach to physicality. The teachers he had known during his many years of life classes would have seen the ‘distortions’ of the body in African sculpture as a naive lack of interest in anatomy, but he developed a different interpretation: ‘I thought the reason why African sculpture looked so bodily right was because the negro artist didn’t carve eyes, noses, mouths in the way they looked in everyday life. He didn’t caricature their appearance but emphasized their dimensional feeling. For instance, if you close your eyes and think of your nose and concentrate on the feeling of its shape, you can soon come to feel that it is much larger than your mirror version…. It can seem to go right over your forehead. Soon you can make it keep going until it makes a high ridge over your head. Or, try to feel the shape of your face with your face, and you’ll find that it can seem either to be smooth and round and flat, or have undulating contours in smooth hills and dales. Still with your eyes closed, now concentrate on your cheekbones. You’ll find they can be felt to protrude even beyond your nose. And the same treatment can be given to get the bodily feeling — rather than the brain’s recollection — of your arms, legs and torso.’12 Whether or not such an interpretation was valid, it provided Lye with a new approach to drawing the human body. It also gave him a new way of responding to modernist sculpture by artists such as Constantin Brancusi.13
Learning about tribal dance rituals gave Lye a more direct way of linking traditional African art with movement, and in a search for information he read many anthropological books. Meanwhile at the Canterbury Museum he was excited to realise that there were traditions of tribal art closer to home, including Aboriginal art from Australia, masks from Papua New Guinea, and many forms of Maori art. Now (in Lye’s words) ‘not only did I go to books, I went to the real things and copied them very assiduously’.14 The museum collection fired his interest in tapa from the Pacific Islands: ‘Tapa design is really just joy, it’s beautifully, geometrically sorted out and coloured, and it’s on this marvellous cloth, you know, off-white, creamy coloured textural stuff’.15 The art of the Australian Aborigines had a huge impact on him with its ‘clear, clean-cut, aesthetic’16 and ‘beautiful colour’.17 Like tapa design, it was not bound by three-dimensional perspective. Besides copying the work in the museum, he read The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904) by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, and this became a favourite book for its illustrations of sand and rock paintings and shield designs. He also read G. A. Stow’s The Native Races of South Africa (1904), which argued that the Australian Aborigines had come originally from the same race as the African Bushmen and had carried ‘into widely separated countries, similar germs of primitive art’.18 Lye was more interested in the art than the history, but such a theory held considerable appeal for him.
What the museum offered most richly was its collection of Maori carvings, and Lye was profoundly impressed to discover that there was a major tradition of indigenous art in his own country. He was particularly interested in carved canoes and the many versions of the tiki. According to Maori tradition, the first human being created by the god Tane was ‘Tiki’, and the name came to be applied to any carved human figure. The kind of small tiki worn round the neck was properly described as a hei-tiki. This was usually made of pounamu (greenstone), but there were some old ones carved in bone, and in ancient times they may have been carved in wood. The hei-tiki figure had a large head, sometimes tilted to one side, and a small straight body projecting down from it with the arms forming symmetrical loops. The legs, which were also symmetrical, tucked in under the body with the feet meeting in a stylised meshing of toes. In this way the human figure was translated into a flat, rhythmic pattern of curves. The hei-tiki had been interpreted as a fertility charm depicting a foetus, but some authorities regarded it simply as a stylised human figure. To Lye it was ‘a fantastic image’ and he copied many examples.
Maori carving was a living tradition, but the best work was being done in remote rural areas, and Lye had grown up without coming into contact with it. In the early years of the century fewer than 3000 Maori lived in the South Island. Even in the North Island the Maori, devastated by war, illness, and loss of tribal land, had tended to retreat into rural seclusion. Eventually the decline in population was reversed and Maori culture reasserted itself vigorously. It is unfortunate that Lye did not meet someone who could have helped him gain access to a traditional Maori community. In Christchurch in 1921 his approach was to educate himself as best he could by studying the museum’s collection and by reading anthropological papers.19 However, he did make some trips to Maori meeting houses,20 and his relationship with this kind of art and knowledge of its contexts was certainly more local and immediate than the relationship of European modernists to African art.
There were New Zealand artists who made picturesque Maori portraits or borrowed design motifs but Lye saw this work as still so Victorian in spirit it could not seriously engage with Maori or any other tradition of tribal art. The challenge was how to internalise a tribal aesthetic, how to pass from theory to practice. He tried to complement his conscious studies by immersing himself in the particular feeling of a work and then leaving intuition to do the rest. As usual he developed this into a nightly exercise: ‘I would take my sketch book and put it by my bed; then, last thing, with everything else under control — pants folded, socks away, teeth done — I would glance through the pages, lingering on the feelings of the works I liked for both their aesthetic and their play of dimensional qualities (sometimes seemingly more than 3D and sometimes less). I’d come to the work I’d reproduced in a sketch earlier that day. I’d look and look at it reviving the particular aesthetic feeling the real object had given me. When I thought I had it and could hold it fast, I’d leave the book open at that page and put it face up under my pillow and then go to sleep.’21
Around this time he made another important discovery — Ezra Pound’s 1916 book Gaudier-Brzeska22 about a French sculptor killed in the First World War. Despite its small print run, this book exercised a deep influence on young artists. (It was a turning point for Henry Moore, for example.) Lye was fascinated by Gaudier-Brzeska’s art, by the radicalism of his ideas, and by the eventful life he had led before dying at the age of 24, only a few years older than he was. He was fascinated by a manifesto in which Gaudier-Brzeska launched an attack on the whole of the Western tradition,23 celebrating as an alternative various forms of the ‘primitive’ such as cave art and the tribal arts of ‘Africa and the Ocean Islands’. Gaudier-Brzeska used vivid phrases such as: ‘they [the artists] fell into contemplation before their sex: the site of their great energy’.24 Alongside the tribal artists he acknowledged a handful of modern Western artists such as Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, and Jacob Epstein, who worked with similar imagery.
For Lye the book was a treasure-trove of information about ‘Cubism, Expressionism, everything that was going on’.25 Particularly striking was the way Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska rejected the Impressionists as old-hat and considered the Futurists to be merely Impressionists in modern dress. The true modern artist was urged to avoid such loose styles and instead to concentrate on the precise arrangement of surfaces and planes, or ‘masses in relation’.
It would take Lye a long time to come fully to terms with these ideas but he was immensely attracted by the modernism that the book communicated with such intensity. ‘All this is new life,’ wrote Pound, ‘it gives a new aroma, a new keenness for keeping awake.’26 But while the book confirmed the relevance of modern art and tribal art, it had little to say about kineticism. Much of Gaudier-Brzeska’s work emphasised solidity, though the sculptor did depict dancers and wrestlers with a strongly implied sense of movement and energy. And Pound quoted some evocative remarks about art by Laurence Binyon: ‘It is not essential that the subject-matter should represent or be like anything in nature; only it must be alive with a rhythmic vitality of its own.’ And: ‘You may say that the waves of Korin’s famous screen are not like real waves: but they move, they have force and volume.’27 Lye was also very impressed by a Japanese haiku quoted by Pound — ‘The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: A butterfly’28 — and he often returned to it when musing about his own art of motion.
Pound’s introduction to modernism made Lye even more determined to go overseas. He went back to Wellington, then restlessly moved north to Auckland. He was offered an advertising job at seven pounds per week but to keep his head clear he decided to work instead as a builder’s labourer, earning ‘a couple of quid a week’ on a council housing scheme at Western Springs where the job involved digging and concreting. His health had improved considerably since he went to Nelson. He became friendly with a tall, proud man, a Maori named Pete. One day the foreman told Pete to go faster: ‘Shovel that mud, or you and I will not agree.’ The workman retorted: ‘To hell with your mud. And we don’t agree.’29 This line by Pete as he exited from the job became a favourite saying for Lye. To Rose’s dismay her son was becoming increasingly ‘bolshie’30 with no ambitions for a middle-class career. Though he studied constantly he seemed to have no desire to benefit from all his hard work. He had the drive and innovative spirit of an entrepreneur but the world of business held no appeal for him. His rebel stance was growing stronger and more uncompromising.
His brother followed him to Auckland, got a job as a truck-driver, and became a boarder in the same house. He remembers that Lye had a period off work because of injury and used the time to make a wood carving which took the hei-tiki as its point of departure but transformed it in the manner of Gaudier-Brzeska or Brancusi.31 The large head became a self-contained oval tilted to one side. Apart from a few curving lines for facial features, it was smooth as an egg. Whereas a hei-tiki usually had large eyes, this had narrow slits so the head created an overall feeling of dreamy repose. Rather than add a straight body with curved limbs, Lye made the whole of the trunk curve so that the usual symmetry was replaced by a series of rounded shapes which ended in a curved leg. The holes or gaps functioned as part of the overall pattern.
Because the hei-tiki was worn as a neck ornament the back was usually flat, but Lye carved an almost naturalistic back. One leg was tucked behind the other and the arms met behind the head in a relaxed pose that reinforced the peaceful look of the face. This figure was at ease, curled up in what Lye would have called a state of ‘no trouble’. A person lying down with their eyes closed could imagine the body in this way.
Tiny as the carving was (about 6 cm by 6 cm), it illustrated the thorough way in which Lye was engaging with Cubism. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque involved a dialogue with African art, whereas Lye was engaging with Maori art. Though a hei-tiki is not a sacred object, Lye’s carving might today be seen as misappropriation or too free a treatment of conventions. But in relation to the Pakeha tradition of art it was boldly innovative, based on a serious engagement with the formal aspects of both Maori art and European modernism. At this time (1922) it would have been difficult to find any other Pakeha artist who shared his interests.