Around the end of 1922 Lye sailed for Sydney, Australia.1 He would have preferred Europe as his destination but boat travel was expensive, and any overseas trip — even the 1600 miles from Auckland to Sydney — was regarded as a huge step for a young person to take. In the words of Lye’s friend Stitch Hemming, ‘If anyone was leaving New Zealand, you’d look a second time and wonder what had come over him or her — what was that person going away for?’2 But Sydney beckoned as ‘that fabulous Australian city which stood for pleasure to New Zealanders as Paris does to the English’.3 In the words of David Low it had ‘the reputation of being, in contrast to our simple honest New Zealand towns, smart, tough, and rather wicked. It was known also as a nursery for poets, writers and caricaturists.’4 Lye had long been curious about the outside world, as Dorothy Hemming recalled: ‘You never knew what he was going to do. I remember him saying “I want to find out how everybody lives”.’5 In Australia he was also looking for art, including Aboriginal work in which he had recently developed a strong interest.6
What first impressed Lye about Australia was nature rather than culture. ‘I used to do canoe trips up the Parramatta River [and then up one of its tributaries]. Four of us would paddle our big canoe with a small sail to help. Sharks could be poked with a paddle. The Australian landscape has the most unique and invidiously permeating nostalgic colour on earth and the most I get out of all my memories of colours and anything else, including one of the best outdoor breakfasts I’ve had, is a moment of light reflected from the eddies lapping beside the canoe tied up beneath a huge gum tree into its leaves, with appropriate gurgles and rustlings.’7 Getting to know the Australian landscape revived his old interest in Impressionism and the first local artist who caught his attention was a painter of transient light, J. J. Hilder (who had died in 1916).
The novelist D. H. Lawrence, who arrived in Sydney at around the same time as Lye, saw the city as still at a raw, formative stage. The central character in his novel Kangaroo says of Sydney: ‘This London of the Southern Hemisphere was all, as it were, made in five minutes, a substitute for the real thing.’8 And: ‘Look at these Australians — they’re awfully nice, but they’ve got no inside to them. They’re hollow…. The colonies make for outwardness … all the mad struggle with the material conveniences — the inside soul just withers.’9 This was a common British stereotype of Australia. But to a New Zealander Sydney could offer many new experiences since its population was almost three times greater than that of any city back home,10 and its culture was less British, with a stronger anti-authoritarian streak. One of the urban pleasures Lye discovered was bohemianism, a style of life in which he felt instantly at home. The first artists he hung around with in pubs were ‘a great gang of fellows from Smith’s Weekly’.11 Lye disliked the magazine’s right-wing politics but loved its black-and-white cartoons and comic strips. Jobs were much sought after because of the wild reputation of the art department: ‘Parties were likely to break out at any time among Smith’s artists…. What no one could be sure of was when they would finish, and what damage would be done before they did.’12 Sampling other pubs and parties, Lye got to know various subcultures of artists and writers. Bohemianism, as he experienced it, was about lively people seeking one another out and finding ways to have a good time on little money. It was about intellectual independence, about radical or irreverent views on religion and politics, and about sexual freedom. It saw itself as egalitarian and classless (although Sydney’s version of bohemia tended still to be male-dominated). There was much talk about the 1917 Russian Revolution, and much talk about the arts, though Lye noted that many talkers seldom turned theory into practice. Personally he preferred to listen and to save his best energies for work.
One of his favourite haunts was the Café La Bohème in Wilmot Street, a ‘meeting-place of artists and writers and actors and singers and pugilists and cat-burglars’.13 There he became friendly with a poet named Geoffrey Cumine, one of the liveliest of the local bohemians. In Kenneth Slessor’s words Cumine ‘got a lot of pleasure out of wearing startling clothes, usually velvet trousers, a red shirt, a green coat and a bright blue beret. He also had brass ear-rings, and a blue butterfly tattooed on one cheek. One day, as a sarcastic allusion to the journalism by which he occasionally earned a living, he had his forehead tattooed with the words “To Let”.’14 (‘Obviously unfurnished,’ commented a fellow writer.) Cumine, twelve years older than Lye, had served in the war and that experience had left him deeply cynical about mainstream politics. ‘What bloody rot!’ was a favourite expression.15 He was an athletic person who liked motorbikes and had frequent accidents because he drove too fast. His poetry reflected Georgian and aesthetic influences, and a modernist such as Ezra Pound would probably have found it old-fashioned, but there was enough sex, blasphemy, and black humour to give it a lively, rebellious spirit.16 The poet’s casual attitude to getting his work published and his refusal to attach too much importance to fame or posterity seemed basic to his style of bohemianism. Lye, who was always looking for artist role models, admired Cumine’s extremism and the feeling was mutual.
In the visual arts Sydney offered a much wider range of modern styles than New Zealand, though Lye was still not able to find any artists who shared his specific interests in motion and primitivism. Between 1918 and 1920 Roy de Maistre had exhibited abstract paintings and collaborated with Roland Wakelin to make a ‘colour disc’ machine but those artists had left for Europe around the time of Lye’s arrival. Some Australian artists were hostile to primitivism on the grounds that what the country needed more urgently was European sophistication. ‘Primitivism as an expression of mind has failed to get even a hearing here,’ Norman Lindsay remarked triumphantly in 1922.17 But there was a keen interest in other aspects of modernism among those associated with Dattilo Rubbo’s art school and there were important individual artists such as Margaret Preston.18 Indeed it is surprising that Lye did not get to know more of them — he seems to have been drawn more often to people from other fields. Once again he was displaying a maverick tendency to go it alone in the visual arts.
Though Lye hated doing commercial art, it enabled him to earn his living in Sydney. Drawing posters for an advertising agency, he impressed everyone with his ‘terrific draughtsmanship with pen or pencil or brush’.19 Philip Lye recalled ‘a poster Len did for the Bank of New South Wales which won a competition — a full-page advertisement of a farmer working and banking his money’. And there was a poster for the Australian Labour Party ‘which impressed them so much they asked Len if he was interested in standing for parliament!’ Constantly making drawings, Lye still did representational work such as his sketches of Edna Dixon (one of his girlfriends in Sydney) and Geoffrey Cumine. He also made Impressionist sketches such as a couple on the beach at Bondi caught with a few quick lines.20 He tried to free-lance as a commercial artist so he would have more time to do his own work but this involved some very lean periods. One of his most interesting commissions was a bookplate with a stylised nude for his friend Hutton Vachini, an artist who collected bookplates.
When Lye had been in Sydney for eight months, he was visited by Walter Tutt who had kept in touch with him since their childhood days at Cape Campbell. In Tutt’s words: ‘Len showed me drawings I couldn’t understand — they were very modern. But I could see he was very good.’21 Lye took his friend round the galleries, and they spent evenings playing poker with one of his friends, a travelling paint-salesman who kept him supplied with cheap tubes of paint. In those days there was a strong community spirit among those who free-lanced in the art business. Tutt was struck by Lye’s determination to keep travelling — he said he had come to Australia ‘to learn some more stuff first’.
Lye made the most of the city’s bookshops, libraries, and museums. He was an avid reader of all avant-garde publications and whenever he had the money he placed an order for imported magazines such as The Dial.22 But public collections continued to be his main source of information. In Sydney he explored the Mitchell Library and the general Public Library which had larger collections than any New Zealand city. He spent so much time there that he would sometimes ‘dream about looking up stuff’.23 Hungry for more information on tribal art he checked out all the ethnological studies, and one day the title Totem and Taboo led him to a book by Sigmund Freud, a writer whose name he had never heard before.24 At first he was disappointed there were no illustrations, but as he read through the book he got more and more excited. It was complex and obscure but here was a thinker that took tribal culture seriously enough to seek to grasp its inner workings. In Freud’s words: ‘If we go behind these [conscious] structures which are like a screen concealing understanding, we realize that the psychic life and the cultural development of primitive savages have hitherto been inadequately appreciated.’25 In his own way Lye was as eager for ‘inwardness’ as D. H. Lawrence, and what he gained from Freud was the concept of the unconscious mind. The book suggested to him that ‘primitive’ cultures were based on the same unconscious mental processes as ‘civilised’ cultures but the latter had tried (unsuccessfully) to disguise and repress them. Freud’s insistence on the power of sexuality posed a powerful challenge to the prudish attitudes that had been carried over from the Victorian age. Censorship was a key issue for many writers and artists of the period (such as Lawrence who had both paintings and novels banned). Freud’s sexual emphasis made his work modern and liberating, and that was certainly part of the attraction for Lye.
Psychoanalysis provided a possible explanation of the power that could be tapped by a maker of images. Lye had discovered two types of imagery that instantly attracted him — modern art and tribal art — both of which opened up worlds of possibility outside orthodox culture. He could now add a third type, the imagery of the unconscious — the imagery of dreams, madness, and sexual fantasies.26 Lye was sure there was an affinity between the three areas of imagery but exactly what this might be was yet to be discovered. It was as though he was gradually locating the pieces of his own culture and weaving them together.
Lye went to W. C. Penfold’s and purchased a 7-inch by 9-inch notebook with unlined pages in which he proceeded to transcribe Totem and Taboo. Such an activity was common in the days before photocopying machines, but in Lye’s words, ‘I was also hoping this humdrum chore would give me time to digest its meanings in relation to my own’.27 Freud’s intellectual style was a real workout for him. Sometimes he tried to bring Freud down to earth by making sentences more colloquial. (Thus a comment about ‘violating a … social prohibition’ became ‘What will the Home folks say?’) Lye wrote on every second page and then filled the facing pages with ink drawings of tribal artefacts, some copied from books and others sketched on the spot in the museums he visited. ‘I would never write 2 or 3 pages unless I had 2 or 3 pages of drawings on the other side.’28 This dialogue between words and images made the notebook a beautiful object, illustrating the careful, loving way he was studying the ideas and forms of art that interested him.
He worked his way to the end of Totem and Taboo though he condensed some sections. Freud seemed to him ultimately too much of a rationalist, but his work was rich in information about the workings of the unconscious, including aspects of tribal culture such as totemism, animism, and magic. One passage described the tendency of ‘primitive man’ to project his ‘inner perceptions’ into the ‘outer world’, and this idea struck Lye as similar to his own explanation of how African artists represented the body. In an attempt to bring modern art into the discussion, he singled out Freud’s remark that cave drawings were not simply ‘to arouse pleasure, but to conjure things’ and related it to Cézanne’s talk of ‘conjuring form’.
Lye carried the notebook round with him everywhere, re-reading it and occasionally adding a new item alongside an existing image which it resembled. His visual examples were as wide-ranging as Freud’s verbal descriptions of totems and taboos. He juxtaposed tribal images from various parts of the world and also drew comparisons between tribal and modern images. On one page for example he brought together a Maori wooden float from a fishing net, an African carving, and a figure by Mikhail Larionov (a Russian painter whose stylised figures mixed peasant art with modernism). On another page he drew a ‘Negro love charm’ alongside a Maori hei-tiki. His choice of modern Western artists included Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein (‘The Rock Drill’), Fernand Léger, and Clément Pansaers. Larionov was strongly represented with illustrations taken from a 1920 English translation of The Twelve, Alexander Blok’s poem about the Russian Revolution. By juxtaposing traditions Lye hoped to discover connections — not that he was trying to blur everything into a single kind of art, for his way of comparing things was always intended to be open-ended and exploratory.
He still lived and worked within mainstream culture but alternative cultures were becoming steadily more important and more real to him. But they reached him as fragments and he wanted to build a somewhat more coherent world out of them. His notebooks were a site in which he could assemble the fragments, pore over them, rearrange them, and gradually weave together his new culture. This was always work in progress, subject to constant revision. Initially the main ingredients were tribal art, modernism, psychoanalysis, and motion. Pound’s book offered some connections, as did his favourite magazines, but there were still many gaps to puzzle over. It was a slow business but he was persistent and determined. Having to do so much work on his own forced him to absorb the material thoroughly and put his own stamp on it.
After transcribing Totem and Taboo into his first notebook, Lye made new links by copying many pages of Gaudier-Brzeska, particularly its advocacy of tribal art which was still his primary interest. Although he was passionately interested in all forms of modern art, the examples he chose to copy tended to be those that bore a strong resemblance to tribal images (such as a Léger imitation of African art or a head by Pansaers that reminded him of a carving from the Bismarck Archipelago). For tribal art Lye’s favourite hunting-ground was the Australian Museum. He devoted special attention to Papuan masks, and also to Aboriginal shields such as those from north-east Queensland: ‘I liked the small nibbling grooves in the wood. I thought those ten-by-four inch small oval shields were the best abstract carvings anywhere, though the African sculptors were more “all around” in the arts.’29 He drew these objects with pencil, Indian ink, and sometimes watercolour (to record ‘the beautiful colour of the Aboriginals’). Though his painstaking approach reflected his deep respect for the carvings,30 there was a discrepancy between their non-Western aesthetics and the way Lye drew them — like an art student copying classic Greek statues, using shading and perspective to achieve a three-dimensional look. Lye’s draughtsmanship at least provided him with a detailed record of the objects for later study. But as he moved through his notebooks his style loosened up; he used bolder lines and became more interested in abstract patterns.
In Gaudier-Brzeska Pound had quoted with approval De Quincey’s remark that a miracle ‘can be wrought if only one man feels a thing more keenly, knows it more intimately than anyone has known or felt it before’.31 Lye’s goal was similar: ‘All I wanted to maintain was complete and utter pre-occupation with the aesthetic feeling [of] the primitive brain.’32 As Pound had praised Gaudier-Brzeska’s ability to understand Chinese ideograms by pure intuition, Lye tried to make sense of tribal objects before reading any commentaries. Though he was interested in what the ethnographers wrote, he wanted above all to develop his gut response. He was still practising his bedtime exercise which he described as ‘going to sleep on the feeling of a particular work, listening to how it looked’.33 He wrote:
I used to put colour sketches just copied
from Abo. shields in Sydney museums
under my pillow every night
to soak up their zimmer …
an early morning pillow coma
got from all night steeping
in Negro Bushman Ocean Island Australian Aboriginal art
to whirl them on a boomerang
and get their feeling back like that34
Wasn’t Lye — who had quarrelled with advertising agencies over their lack of originality — becoming merely an imitator of tribal art? ‘I got to the point where I was rather shamed by it, for myself. I was bloody well copying …! But when these guys, you know, like Cézanne, and everybody, copy Old Masters, I thought, well, who the hell am I to worry about it?’35 Lye was certain that once he had paid his dues — once he had absorbed the aesthetics of the tribal ‘Old Masters’ — he would at last be ‘capable of inventing authentic new primitive stuff’. But sometimes, with a young artist’s impatience, he was deeply frustrated by the slow speed at which he was developing. He thought of Gaudier-Brzeska producing so much important work before his death at 24. Lye could only hope his preparation would pay off in the end. Despite his personal isolation, he was not the only artist working along these lines. Young artists in Europe were also looking for unique ways to combine tribal art with modern art, and they were starting to add Freudian ideas to the mix. What gave Lye’s work the potential for distinctiveness was his singular personality, his engagement with forms of indigenous art from his own region of the world, and his interest in movement — an interest that was about to surge strongly back into his art.