Although Lye’s first two years in New York were very eventful in personal terms, and he had a full-time job as a director, he also completed a great deal of painting and writing. His burst of painting in the late 1940s was based on the free-wheeling style he had developed just before the war. These ‘oil doodles’ (as he sometimes called them) were painted on board rather than canvas and ranged in size up to three by four-and-a-half feet.1 The brushwork was vigorous, so that the lines were full of movement and the pictures tended to have a raw, unfinished look, as though Lye had thrown away the final traces of his art-school training. Despite this bold style his approach was still slow and self-critical; he would often get up in the middle of the night to change a detail, and he threw away pictures he was not satisfied with. He was trying to combine oil painting with the energy of doodling, producing restless lines and curious shapes that hovered at the edge of meaning. The colours were earthy and the eye needed time to tune in to the paintings, to their apparent looseness of form. The imagery was so abstract that halfway through a painting Lye would sometimes generate new ideas by turning it upside down (as he had done with the Rorschach ink blots). Still, he always associated the finished paintings with natural forms and processes such as rain, sunlight, seeding, and growth.
The late 1940s were an exceptional time for painters in New York. Before the war Europe had been so firmly established as the home of modern art that New York seemed peripheral, but with the rise of Fascism many European artists had fled there. Their presence acted as a catalyst, particularly on the emerging painters who would later become known around the world as the abstract expressionists or the New York School. These American artists were not drawn to the geometric style of abstraction championed by Piet Mondrian, or to the ‘literary’ imagery of the better-known surrealists, but took as their starting point the more ‘painterly’ or ‘plastic’ forms of surrealism, the kinds of abstract art based on doodling that they saw in the work of Matta Echaurren, André Masson, and Joan Miró. This had long been Lye’s aesthetic preference. In the late 1930s he had found himself isolated as an artist because most of his English friends were drawn to other types of surrealism or to geometrical abstraction. Now American artists felt (as Barnett Newman put it) that ‘only an art of no-geometry can be a new beginning’.2 Many of these artists (such as Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko) were close in age to Lye, though some (such as Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock) were a decade younger. Lawrence Alloway has described this phase of American art as ‘the Biomorphic Forties’3 because the paintings contained so many doodled shapes suggesting biological forms.
Periodically modern art had felt compelled to return to basics — ‘To be original is to go back to origins’, as Antonio Gaudí put it4 — and it was in this spirit that the New York avant-garde of the late 1940s jettisoned as much artistic ballast as possible, including a great deal of what had come to be recognised as modern art. These artists were more interested in nature than culture, more interested in ancient myths than in fashionable new work from Paris. To quote Robert Motherwell: ‘We replaced the nude girl and the French door with a modern Stonehenge, with a sense of the sublime.’ The ideal was to create ‘an abstract picture as rich as nature’.5 This aesthetic bore striking similarities to the one Lye had been pursuing for years. His work also anticipated the increasing emphasis these artists placed on the physical act of applying paint, an approach later described as ‘gestural’ or ‘action’ painting. Lawrence Alloway’s observation that ‘There is a psycho-sexual content in biomorphic art, which abounds in visceral lyricism full of body allusions’ could be applied to Lye’s art throughout his career.6 In the 1950s painters such as Jackson Pollock moved away from biomorphic imagery and concentrated on purer or more painterly forms of abstract art. Lye did not join the trend to larger canvases nor did he feel any need to abandon biomorphic imagery. At the same time he enjoyed the physical energy of Pollock’s paintings, their links with jazz, and the way they sometimes suggested the flurry of subatomic particles. Lye’s hand-painted films had always included patterns of an abstract expressionist type, blown up to a huge size on the cinema screen. His exceptional ability to control the process of painting and scratching on celluloid was comparable to Pollock’s control of the drip technique.
How much contact did Lye have with ‘the New York School’? The community of vanguard artists was small in those days and between 1949 and 1955 many of its activities revolved around ‘The Club’ (or ‘Artists’ Club’) at 39 East 8th Street. Lye often took part in ‘the cackle and crack of the brain functions’ at this venue,7 as he later recalled: ‘I met all the abstract expressionist boys before they expressionisted. I met all the good artists of NYC at The Club and showed my films there. We’d meet and talk art, then dance and dance, good old day’s stuff. I saw them later when abstract expressionism grabbed the ball from Paris. I liked all their stuff and I think they liked mine.’8 During the 1950s Lye also spent time at the Cedar Tavern at 8th Street and University Place, which functioned as a neighbourhood bar for the downtown art community.9 He made other contacts through the Museum of Modern Art, which held screenings of his films, and through his old friend Stanley William Hayter, who was his next-door neighbour in Washington Street. Hayter’s Atelier 17, transferred from Paris to a loft above Rosenthal’s art supply store on East 8th Street, became an important centre of print-making in New York, frequented by the leading young American artists as well as by European émigrés.
Although Lye found the art scene congenial and knew most of its members, and his films and paintings had anticipated some aspects of the abstract styles now being developed, he preferred to stay on the margins. Accustomed to working in isolation, he did not look for a group to exhibit with. He was also reluctant to spend time chasing publicity or negotiating with dealers and collectors. Other New York artists accepted that kind of hustling as part of the job, but Lye felt he had wasted too much of his energy in London and he was happy simply to give paintings away to friends. By not linking his work more directly with abstract expressionism — the art movement poised to ‘grab the ball from Paris’ — he passed up one of the best opportunities of his life to acquire a prestige label and thus command the attention of critics, museums, and buyers.
Clement Greenberg, the influential art critic and champion of the abstract expressionists, liked what he saw of Lye’s paintings and considered his films ‘ahead of their time’ but was surprised by the artist’s ‘lack of drive’: ‘I felt he came out of the 1920s in his way as a person, and that he was Anglicized in this respect. The British writers and artists we saw in New York in the 40s and 50s all seemed to come out of the 20s: their bohemianism, their unstudied free-and-easiness, their desperate dissipatedness. But Len didn’t dissipate as far as I know. What he did do was expect the world to be as un- and informal as he himself was. By that time Americans of my generation — which hadn’t come out of the 20s — were ever so much grimmer. My retrospective impression is that this was why Len didn’t make real contact with the New York art world. Not that he seemed to mind, he was so much more at ease with himself than the inhabitants of that world.’10 New York may have been more informal than London in its style, but it also had a more competitive, business-minded culture. Greenberg’s comments are highly perceptive but we should note that Lye’s ‘free-and-easiness’ was not merely British — it had its roots in Australia, Samoa, and New Zealand. It was related to his sturdy sense of independence. While he got on well with other artists, he liked to keep some space round himself, and he was indifferent to fashion. These frontier values — which also harked back to the heroic days of modernism — kept him strong and self-sufficient but they would be increasingly out of place in post-war American society.
Besides meeting American artists at Hayter’s Atelier, Lye renewed his acquaintance with Ruthven Todd, the poet and engraver who had made his house available to his family. It was through him that Lye met Joan Miró when the Spanish artist came to the United States in 1947 to paint a mural for a hotel restaurant.11 Staying in New York’s Spanish Harlem, Miró would go downtown to the Atelier to collaborate on prints with Todd. He visited Lye at his current home at 278 West 4th Street, and despite his limited English and Lye’s total lack of Spanish or French, the two artists felt a very strong affinity for each other’s work. Miró left an artist’s proof of one of his prints signed: ‘À Len Lye, affectueusement [To Len Lye, affectionately]’.
Besides being a fruitful period for Lye’s painting, the late 1940s brought new developments in his poetry. He developed the habit of writing a prose-poem on the back of each new painting before giving it to a friend. Though triggered off by a specific image, the prose-poem was always surprising, seeming to reveal a strange tribal mythology concealed within the abstract patterns of the picture. The simple structure of the sentences was deceptive, for the poems followed a strange logic as though objects and words were undergoing a kind of sea change. For example, ‘Silver Sea Valley’:
There is a valley of pure silver and sand without earth where moonbeams drain down to silver the sea at night. Pearls have taken root in silver cracks and hollows filled with dew. They have grown into trees that live on moonlight and sea mist. The trees have blooms that only unfold from their stalks in the moonlight. Crabs climb the trees and go from flower to flower to eat the moon seeds in them. At the centre of each seed is a speck of silver sand. The crabs take sea smells from one flower to another. The trees know the crabs will carry the moon seeds down to the sea. And they will become pearls again.12
Colours are simple and strong, as in ‘Frost Dance’:
A red moon is the start of frost…. All eggs in earth turn to black stone if they are caught…. Veins of trees and rocks come out and dance in the green fields.
Intensely active and physical, Lye’s poems brought all the senses into play. He described the earth responding to the touch of sunlight, lightning, snow, and hot lava. Marine creatures led a vivid sex life:
It is night-time 60 feet deep by a coral reef. A coral king leaves his skin of rock. A queen of starfish leaves her shell. They meet as they really are and make ideas of the sea. He puts red and she puts yellow. That makes phosphorus and they see. Some finished phosphorus by that stem of seaweed will float to the top and be their memories. They make a lot of memories and go back to their shells. They always are new to each other out of their shells.
The poems evoked an animistic world in which darkness, thunder, and fire were as much living beings as seeds or fish. The most common theme was metamorphosis — a snake started standing on its tail, plants learned to walk, branches became birds. Human beings appeared occasionally in these poems but were still very much part of nature:
They plant all things and grow their own blood and iron. They don’t need the Seer any more but sometimes he helps them with rain…. Today when people stand up straight and still on hills and feel the earth with their feet they are most like a tree because a tree has its heart in its roots.13
These poems varied in length from a single sentence to the three pages of ‘A Tree Has Its Heart In Its Roots’ (1948) which combined a number of incidents and images into an evolutionary ‘fable’. Such myth-making was informed by Lye’s memories of New Zealand and Samoan landscapes, by his lifetime study of tribal cultures, and by his own paintings and films such as the unfinished Tusalava trilogy. While the poems were complete in their own right they provided a kind of verbal parallel to biomorphic abstraction in art. It is a pity that Lye made no attempt to publish them, not even after the 1960s when the growth of interest in ‘deep image’ writing and ‘ethnopoetics’ (stimulated by magazines such as Alcheringa and the poetry anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg) enlarged the audience for work of this kind.
Some of his experiments went even further than ‘Song Time Stuff’ in their self-conscious questioning of language and the writing process. The work of the Greenwich Village poet E. E. Cummings may have provided a model for the intricate wordplay of poems such as ‘t w i’:
why should writ (y) ing should i
we when word say sign not
it its is me world its
my….
Though ‘Knife Apple Sheer Brush’ was explicitly a tribute to Stanley William Hayter, written after seeing an exhibition of his work in January 1948, it provides a vivid expression of Lye’s own aesthetic. The first draft was little more than a piece of didactic prose (‘Paintings state / Enduring qualities / Of individual experience / Isolated as art’), but Lye developed it into a sensuous lyric:
|
Take a |
knife |
|
To an |
apple |
|
The pith lies |
sheer |
|
With the mind take a |
brush |
|
Peel the skin of your own |
pith |
|
See the sinews of |
feeling |
|
Traced in the glow of vegetable |
dyes |
|
Pinioned by the black |
action |
|
Of the cadmium |
sun |
HAYTER
The poem then described his visit to Hayter’s exhibition as an encounter with a unique vision:
mind stands confronted with mind
Not by museum label or institution
But by the work of one man
Seeking responsibility for his version
Of the transparent skin of the universe
Hayter’s pictures were celebrated as ‘hypnotic mind juice’, as ‘living candescent signs’, and as ‘priceless scarecrows / Guarding the seeds of experience’.14 In March 1949 this poem was published in The Tiger’s Eye alongside Hayter’s ‘White Shadow’, a painting whose lines were charged with kinetic energy. The Tiger’s Eye, which took its title from William Blake, was edited in Greenwich Village by Ruth and John Stephen. One of the most important avant-garde magazines of the period, it published poetry alongside the work of European artists such as Joan Miró and Paul Klee, composers such as John Cage, and new American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, and Barnett Newman (who worked as associate editor). As a showcase for biomorphic painting, the magazine explored such topics as prehistoric art, mythology, surrealism, and the Sublime. ‘Grass Clippings’ and another piece of Lye’s poetic prose, ‘Am Thing’, were also accepted for The Tiger’s Eye but unfortunately it ceased publication in 1949 with its ninth issue and there was no other magazine for which he felt impelled to write.
Writing was not the only area of experiment during the excitement of his first years in New York. Ann Lye recalls: ‘Len was getting into all kinds of things, such as finding old doorknobs and painting them in weird ways and giving them to friends.’ In 1947–48 he was busy making photograms, silhouette photographs produced without a camera. His photograms of the 1920s and 1930s had been based on curious combinations of objects, or abstract shapes moulded in plasticine; now he focused on people’s heads. He persuaded visitors to lie on the floor of a small dark room, on a sheet of unexposed photographic paper,15 then he would make the exposure with a flick of the light switch. With his current interest in signs of the self — a theme explored in poems such as ‘t w i’ — Lye was intrigued by the idea of someone leaving a direct imprint, a physical profile. But then, to complicate this reality, he would flip the image, reverse positive and negative, or add words and visual symbols (as he had done in his 1937 film N. Or N.W.). This involved making additional exposures so that a piece of fabric, say, or a fern, or a necklace could be superimposed over the silhouette. His photograms included many friends such as the artists Joan Miró, Hans Richter, and Georgia O’Keeffe. In the case of O’Keeffe the superimposed shape was a pair of deer antlers she had given the Lyes as a present. Other participants included the architect Le Corbusier, the scientist Nina Bull, Roy Lockwood from the March of Time, and the plumber Albert Bishop who had come to do repairs. (Bishop’s silhouette was ringed with tools and washers.) When a couple arrived with their newborn baby it was positioned naked on the floor but foiled the first attempt by wetting the photographic paper. The second attempt was a success and the parents framed and hung the result. Wystan Hugh Auden, a fellow expatriate from England, also submitted to the photogram ritual, and Lye superimposed a wry stanza from a poem Auden had just written over his distinctive profile:
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.16
Perhaps the most striking picture in the series was Lye’s ‘Self-portrait’, made by superimposing the complex photogram ‘Night Tree’ (included in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition)17 onto the silhouette of his head, creating what he called an ‘x-ray’. Soon Lye would find a new way of applying these techniques to film-making.