One day when Ann Lye was in the studio she noticed a letter from England on the floor — an invitation to attend an animation film festival in Cambridge with an offer of accommodation and return fares for them both. When she asked Len what he was doing about it he replied: ‘Nothing, I haven’t got time.’ Ann had heard that excuse once too often. She said, ‘I think it’s about time you got to New Zealand again. You haven’t been there in over 40 years and I’m going to see if this Cambridge trip can be used to get us started on a trip round the world.’ He was pessimistic about the prospects but with Ann’s urging he started trying to set up some lectures.1 She knew that the idea of seeing New Zealand again was the only possible way of persuading him to make a long trip. Despite his antipathy to nationalism he had always bristled when he heard this small country described in a condescending way. He had never lost (or tried to change) his New Zealand accent, and if he was asked whether he ‘came from England or Australia’, he always made a point of setting the record straight.
Lye’s most positive memories of the country had to do with nature rather than culture. From the religious prejudice faced by his parents in the 1900s to the conservatism of the official art scene of the 1920s, he had found New Zealand’s mainstream culture claustrophobic, but he was certain that the natural environment had profoundly influenced his work, as had the indigenous art of the region. He had observed in 1946 in a poetic passage of ‘You Be Me’: ‘This style is from me in my quest — kid to adult — [growing up around] the coasts the hills the trees the plains…. Biographically then was bone and mind knitting far from the visual imagery groove of continental cubic walls of coffee surrealist human split-strewn-spent-match-used sidewalks of café. Instead, as an ant with a brush, I was alone in the Australasian wides, with pilgrimages to towns like Wellington and Sydney to homage a plethora of Polynesia and Melanesia ritual works of art that had been swiped off to the museums.’2 Writing ‘Happy Moments’ had made him curious to see New Zealand again, and in 1965 he had had his first meeting with his brother for more than 40 years. During Philip’s visit to New York they compared notes on their childhood and Lye said he would like to return to exhibit his sculpture and give some talks. The artist was also interested in finding a quiet location in New Zealand, Australia, or the Pacific Islands where he could paint.3 His interest in painting had been rekindled by his speculations about genetic imagery in his early canvases and by his difficulties with more expensive media such as film and sculpture.
Philip Lye worked as a dentist and a part-time musician, playing the saxophone in dance bands. Although the brothers felt very close, Philip was not involved with the visual arts. His letters offered no hint that the art scene in New Zealand had been going through some big changes. Lye was surprised, then, when a new generation of well-informed New Zealanders started contacting him. First there was Peter Tomory of the Auckland City Art Gallery who came to tell him in 1964 ‘that New Zealand was going modern in its culture’.4 Tomory, born in England, had a strong interest in international art. At the Auckland Gallery he had survived fierce public controversies over exhibitions of Henry Moore sculpture in 1956 and British abstract painting in 1958. The mayor of Auckland had denounced the Moore exhibition as ‘repulsive’ and a ‘desecration’ of the gallery, and a leading member of the city council had campaigned against the purchase of Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Torso II’ because it looked to him like ‘the buttock of a dead cow washed up on a beach’.5 These were heroic years for the struggle to gain public acceptance for modern forms of art. Some artists and art schools had promoted modern styles for many years but there were still many New Zealanders who had hardly ever come into contact with it. With Tomory as director and Colin McCahon as keeper, the Auckland City Art Gallery’s exhibitions were creating extremes of scorn and excitement.
Tomory had been delighted to get to know a New Zealander who was an avant-garde artist, and Lye had been impressed by his visitor and intrigued by his suggestion of a return visit to New Zealand. Unfortunately, when in 1965 Tomory had taken the proposal for a lecture tour by Lye on ‘fine art film and kinetic art’ back to the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council (the recently created arts funding body in New Zealand), the organisation was not interested. In 1966 Lye was sorry to hear that Tomory had left for a job overseas, and observed wryly that New Zealand was still not able to hold on to its talented people.6 But the seed of the idea continued to grow. In October 1966 he wrote: ‘I think I’d like the climate, vegetation and general topography of New Zealand so much if I ever got back … that I could stick, especially if I didn’t care [about] the typical non-support attitude for non-traditional art … like in the reaction of the Queen Liz Arts Council [which was] exactly the kind of attitude that drove me out of New Zealand in the first place. Now … I could afford to not get any support — because my work has matured enough for me to not even need the moral support one gets out of being in the world’s cultural center, NYC. Although I’d need all sorts of technological do-dabs for my films and steel types of motion composition I would not mind to just settle down and paint fantastic paintings.’7
Other lively New Zealanders began writing to Lye, such as Hamish Keith who had taken over as keeper of the Auckland City Art Gallery. As the New Zealand art scene sought to strengthen its links with international contemporary art, its far-sighted members took great pleasure in the rediscovery of an artist who had successfully bridged the two worlds more than 40 years ago. Having first heard of him from Tomory, Keith was astonished to see A Colour Box for the first time: ‘I was shocked to discover that Lye had preceded Norman McLaren in the production of direct films. McLaren’s films had been the staple diet of the National Film Library, they were shown to us at school. And of course everyone here was led to believe that McLaren was the pioneer of drawing on film. It’s another example of how New Zealanders undervalue and misunderstand their own culture — we defer to other people and don’t believe in our own powers of innovation.’8 In 1967 Keith visited New York with the help of a Carnegie Fellowship, lectured on New Zealand art at the Museum of Modern Art, and visited Lye’s studio. Since Keith knew nothing of his work as a sculptor, the visit was an astonishing introduction: ‘In no time at all every single piece in the whole studio was working, including the snake that unrolled between two rooms. The whole house was chugging and banging and thumping. It was extraordinary, Len just kept turning on other pieces. At the same time as he was hurling his ideas at me nineteen to the dozen, he was wanting to find out from me what was really going on in New Zealand. And trying to discover whether there was any sort of New Zealandness left in him. What do you think of this work? Is this strange to you? Does it belong to you? Is this my part of you?… I had a really strong sense that he had got to a time in his life when he was asking himself: where do I belong?’
The two men had long conversations in various artists’ bars. ‘Len used to dance along the streets. He literally would be dancing, dancing around you while he was talking. He would dance from sentence to sentence, and walking with him was always an adventure. I always felt comfortable with him. To me he was a New Zealander — as long as he’d been away, they couldn’t take New Zealand out of the man.’ Keith came to see him as ‘a great example of the kind of generous, innovative, ad hoc, radical genius that New Zealand seems to produce from time to time. Our culture does have a radical imagination, even though we also have an army of people trying to suppress it. All our radical writers and artists were concealed from me when I was growing up. I was led to think books were only written by dead foreign people. When I saw Colin McCahon’s paintings for the first time, they absolutely rocked me. And Len to me was another of those extraordinary visionaries, like people in cartoons with a light bulb in their head. I could see his idea of the temple translate so easily from Death Valley to the volcanic landscape of the Central Plateau. I discussed that with him — I said, “Re-do it for the pumice plateau under Mt Ruapehu!’”
The two kept up a lively correspondence after Keith returned to Auckland. When Lye announced that he was planning to visit, Keith did his best to organise lectures, as did the art dealer Peter McLeavey in Wellington. However, as Keith recalls, ‘Until people had actually met Len and seen his work, it was hard to generate any enthusiasm.’ The fees Lye was offered were paltry by American standards. He agreed to do a lecture in Auckland out of loyalty to friends and relatives, but said no to the rest. (‘Ann is mutinying on the others as they take so much damn preparation — rehearsals and all that’.)9 Despite such disappointments, the Lyes managed to find the money for their round-the-world tickets and on 30 October they flew out of New York.
Their first stop was London, where they spent a wonderful week revisiting old haunts such as Hammersmith and the Black Lion Pub, and socialising with friends such as Barbara Ker-Seymer, Gwen and Alan Herbert, Ivor Montagu, and Sidney Bernstein. Lye revisited the British Museum. Then they moved to Cambridge for the Animation Festival which began on 6 November. In Ann’s words: ‘We adored Cambridge. Goose pimples at everything. We fell in love with England all over again and immediately wanted to live there!’ Lye had put a huge effort into his lecture for Cambridge. For some time now he had been trying to find a way of combining all his current ideas in one package. He had tested this in Buffalo and Berkeley, but was particularly pleased with the version for Cambridge. He gave a crowded three-hour lecture in two parts — ‘Art and the Body’ and ‘Art and the Genes’, illustrated by films, slides, and audio tapes (coordinated with the help of three assistants). Film-makers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill who were in the audience remember it as ‘a marvellously untidy talk but terribly strong, personal and dynamic’.10
Lye’s overall title for the lecture, ‘The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid’, alluded not to LSD but to DNA (that is, to nucleic acids). His all-embracing theory was based largely on visual parallels, displaying the logic of a visually oriented thinker. A witty series of ‘lookalike’ slides pointing to similarities between artists and their images amused the audience even if it didn’t persuade them that an artist’s unique gene pattern shaped his or her art. Lye was never discouraged by the scepticism of his audiences — he was so excited about the intricate web of visual correspondences he was able to weave. Films and Filming said of the event: ‘Lye himself [is] a slim wiry man looking like a close relative of Ho Chi Minh, dressed in a jolly red sort of kaftan and tripping over his microphone cable. His intelligence is immediately apparent, his sense of humour engaging and, like much of his work, faintly surrealist. But, as with many artists totally absorbed in their own creativity, he has difficulty in communicating clearly to his audience the complex thought processes and impulses which have led him to his present state of development.’11 For the Observer Lye was ‘a legend’, as other-worldly in his appearance as he was in his thinking: ‘Len Lye, a lean, bald, goblin of a man, pushing 70 … looks, in fact, exactly like the traditional cartoon Martian.’12
After the talk the Lyes returned to London. In Ann’s words, ‘We spent time on buses and walking, looking at everything. I was struck by all the things growing in the streets, all the coloured things that grow in the dampness of London. We went back to Eric Kennington’s studio on the river, and Julian Trevelyan and his second wife were living there, and he was putting up some studios. We were so much in love with London that we applied for one of the studios. But it was November — and in the end we had second thoughts about the climate!’ Next the Lyes made a two-day trip to Edinburgh University where a famous biologist, Professor C. H. Waddington, had invited the artist to lecture. This was a rare opportunity to address a science rather than an arts audience, at a leading research centre. As Ann recalls: ‘It was a classroom going straight up, very steeply banked, and way down below there was this big desk behind a kind of fence. Len got very involved in demonstrating something, he wanted to get higher to communicate with the people in the high seats, so he just climbed up on the desk and gave most of the lecture from there! He had everybody in hysterics — those animal scientists didn’t have much sense of humour, but they were roaring. His ideas didn’t relate to anything they were studying and they were just amazed by him — he was so entirely unscientific as far as they were concerned. It showed them an entirely different mentality, one they had never run into and weren’t even aware of, and they were completely nonplussed. But as an event, it was a great success. Some of Len’s lectures were very successful and some were absolute flops. In its own way Edinburgh was a success.’13
On 18 November the Lyes flew from London to Mallorca, where they were met by Robert and Beryl Graves and taken to their home, Canellun, at Deyá. Ann Lye wrote in her diary: ‘Heavenly setup — oranges ripe — our own little house. Climbing mountains like goats — Majorcan soup and thin bread — sweet rolls for breakfast — more climbing around — best squid ever for dinner’. Lye and Graves had remained friends despite the huge difference in their interests. As Ann saw it, ‘Robert had a tremendous classical education, whereas Len couldn’t have cared less about that, he was for the pre-classical! I was walking up a mountain-side one day with Robert when he said out of the blue, “Ann, I just can’t understand why you married Len!” He and Len thought so differently. Len never knew what Robert was, and Robert never knew what Len was at all — and yet they always had such a great affinity.’14 They regarded each other as ‘old myth men’. When Lye had told Graves in a letter about the apparent discovery of ancient evolutionary information in his paintings, the latter had replied: ‘Yes, chum, you and I do things in a weird [way] certainly inherited from Ireland or Scotland or some place which enables us to work in the fifth dimension and so by-pass time, and be considered geniuses for anticipating strange facts and phenomena. I’m accustomed to it now after writing The White Goddess in perfect ignorance of history.’15
The Lyes left Mallorca on 21 November, and over the next eleven days they visited Rome, Venice, Athens, and Delphi. They were seeing Italy and Greece for the first time. While Lye may have retained mixed feelings about classical art from his student days when classes had to copy replica statues, the experience of walking around the ancient sites fired his imagination. Ann recalls: ‘One Sunday he went out and spent the whole day in the drizzly rain at the Parthenon, transporting himself back. He empathised so much. He got the biggest kick of the trip, I think, at Delphi. He just became one of the people with this goat going to the Oracle.’ Such experiences strengthened his commitment to the idea of a temple, and reinforced his belief that the ancients had brought art and architecture together more successfully than anyone since.
The Lyes flew from Athens to Sydney via Bangkok. They found the flight disturbing because it took them over Viet Nam. In Ann Lye’s words, ‘We’re anti any war, and most of all that war’.16 Arriving in Sydney they made contact with Daniel Thomas, assistant curator of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, who had written to the artist for information about the marble portrait head that Rayner Hoff had sculpted in the 1920s. The head was on display in the gallery and Lye was amused to see that — like Van Gogh — it had lost one ear.17 Parties, press interviews and visits to Sydney galleries took up the rest of their week, except for a day spent driving north to the mouth of the Hawkesbury River where he wanted to revisit a favourite beach. Then on 13 December the Lyes flew to New Zealand, where the artist’s first priority was to revisit the places of his early childhood. They had planned to fly around the country but changed their minds as soon as they saw Christchurch. Instead they got up at five and caught an early bus to Blenheim, through the landscape he remembered as ‘bosom hills’. In Ann’s words, ‘It was a gorgeous trip — how anyone could bear to fly it I don’t know. At Blenheim we had tea in a little store where everybody seemed to think we were funny or something. Then we rented a car and drove along the tracks to Cape Campbell.’ At the Cape Lye was delighted to find the lighthouse unchanged, except that the light no longer burned oil and the keeper’s house now had electricity and a washing machine.18
In Wellington the artist revisited his old schools, and then he and Ann went to meet Peter McLeavey whose dealer gallery was an important centre for New Zealand art. McLeavey had become curious about Lye’s work several years earlier when he had learned that he was a New Zealander. Obtaining Lye’s address from Howard Wise, he had struck up a correspondence. He found his films and kinetic sculptures ‘astounding’ and reported his discovery in a Wellington newspaper (‘New Zealand Born Artist Has Won Renown in Unusual Idiom’).19 The Lyes had dinner with McLeavey and he held a party in their honour at his gallery. He found Ann ‘charming and very attractive’ and Len impressive for ‘his intelligence, his vigour, and his wonder at being alive. Every day when he got out of bed he seemed to confront the world with the eyes of a child. The way he responded to nature was a kind of pantheism, and he celebrated this in his art. He was interested in so many things. He had met so many famous people. You could have a conversation with him on any topic, from Ezra Pound, say, to the colour theories of Rodchenko.’20 McLeavey was struck by Lye’s New Zealandness after 44 years away: ‘It’s like the case of Picasso. If you know Picasso is Spanish, and you know Spain, then you can see the Spanish element in his work. It’s the same with Len — he transcended his nationality, but there is a New Zealand element if you know how to look for it.’ Lye was equally impressed by McLeavey: ‘I think it is fabulous of Peter to stick it out and try to keep art moving in so meagre an art collecting place as Wellington. It would break anyone else’s heart.’21
It was through this gallery that Lye met Gordon Walters, one of the country’s most important artists. Born in 1919, Walters appears to have been the only New Zealand artist aware of Lye’s career from the early days, thanks to his extensive reading of overseas art magazines. He wrote: ‘I first became aware of Len Lye in 1936 through a copy of Herbert Read’s Surrealism which had a reproduction of one of his paintings. Round about this time I made the acquaintance of a Wellington commercial artist, Keith Hoggard, who had been a student with Len at the Wellington Technical College School of Art under Linley Richardson. I got from him a good picture of what Len was like. Richardson told Hoggard that Len was an exceptional student. As I learned more about Len I found that his interests in art in many ways paralleled my own. We were both interested in tribal art especially Bushman art via the books of G. W. Stow, Aboriginal art and Melanesian and Pacific art styles.’22 Around 1946 Walters’s art went through a profound change, setting aside some of its technical virtuosity (as Lye’s art had done) under the influence of surrealism, tribal art, and cave art, and in that year he made a first-hand study of Maori rock art in the South Island.23 Walters’s paintings marked a new stage in the development of modernism in New Zealand art.24 He spent time with Lye during his visit to Wellington and was particularly struck by ‘an inspiring talk right off the cuff’ that the film-maker gave to the National Film Unit. Lye put this institution on the spot by passionately arguing the case for newcomers to have ‘bread and space to work’ and access to its film library and film equipment ‘after hours if necessary’. If this was not forthcoming, then ‘the young chaps have got to get off their arses and agitate, picket, and vibrate some walls till the glass quakes’.25 Lye’s advocacy was timely since the next few years would see the emergence of a new wave of film-makers and the creation of the first ‘film co-ops’ in New Zealand.26
The Lyes spent Christmas with Philip and other family members. Although the brothers had lived their lives in such different worlds — a dentist in suburban Auckland, an artist in Manhattan — they were totally at home with each other, sharing the same accent and the same droll sense of humour. (When Philip had visited New York and met Bix and Yancy for the first time, they had been astonished by his likeness to their father.) Around this time the Lyes also visited artists such as Jim Allen and Don Binney. Binney lived at Anawhata on the West Coast, not far from the area later used as a location for the film The Piano, and this was one of several landscapes that impressed Lye deeply. In a radio interview with Hamish Keith he said that as far as he was concerned the most distinctive aspect of the country was its topography, which kept its inhabitants always aware of the force of nature. He could imagine expatriate artists returning at the end of their lives to New Zealand ‘like salmon coming up the old river’, as the place to create ‘their final messages’.
As usual the Lyes went to check out the ethnographic art at the local museum. In Ann’s words, ‘I had to go to the ladies’ room. I was directed down a hallway to some stairs. Along the hallway I passed a marvellous figure. I went back to Len and said, ‘Come and see this!’ He absolutely fell in love with that figure. We were shocked that this figure wasn’t more prominently on display so we went straight to the office of the director of the museum. Len said, “This is the most beautiful thing you have in this whole museum, something has got to be done with her!”’27 As he later described her in a letter to Keith: ‘Along with a Brancusi fish and a couple of African [sculptures], she’s one of the sculpture-half-dozen-humanity-forever jobs!’28 This tall, dark figure carved from a single log of wood was Kawe (or Kave) de Hine Ali‘gi from the small island of Nukuoro in the Caroline Islands. Within the matrilineal culture of the island, Kawe was a goddess. Since arriving at the Auckland Museum in 1878 this figure had moved from prominent display to banishment in a store room, perhaps because someone had decided that she was ‘lacking in artistic merit, or her pronounced breasts and tattooed pubic area were unsuitable for general exhibition’.29 When the Lyes saw her she was back in public, displayed in an obscure corner but already scheduled to occupy a more prominent place when a new gallery was completed.30 Lye’s outburst was natural for someone who had been protesting against the conservatism of museums for half a century. Kawe was later to become one of the Auckland Museum’s most treasured exhibits, receiving international attention in 1984 when it was borrowed by the Museum of Modern Art for its controversial exhibition ‘“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art’.31
By the time their visit ended on the first day of 1969 Ann Lye had come to see New Zealand as a country in which ‘the general standard of everything is maybe 30 years behind, but the young people are just the same as in New York. They are right in the groove of art. Len would go somewhere like the Barry Lett Gallery in Auckland and the young artists would sit around on the floor and ask questions. The young New Zealanders are terrific — the old ones are stodgy!’32 Although Lye had come to New Zealand not to see contemporary art but to renew his acquaintance with his family and with the landscape, he was struck by the energy of the local art scene. In a letter to photographer John Turner he wrote: ‘Say hello to all the crazy young artists I met and tell them they inspired me to know there was the right stuff at long last in the old joint.’33
Following the same route he had taken 45 years earlier when he left New Zealand, Lye headed for the Pacific Islands. He and Ann visited Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. In Samoa he located the area near Mt Vaea where he had once lived, but the region had changed so much it took him several days to find it. He learned that his Samoan friend had died six months earlier. After delaying their departure because of a hurricane in the area, the Lyes flew on to Hawaii, where they spent a relaxed three weeks staying with friends on various islands. On 5 February they arrived back in New York. In contrast to the places they had been visiting, Manhattan now seemed full of noise and dirt. Ann in particular found herself ‘resisting New York like mad’34 and wondering if the time had come for them to sell their place and move, particularly as Lye’s job at New York University was coming to an end. In the wake of the trip he continued to receive letters and enquiries from New Zealand. The National Film Library ordered copies of A Colour Box and Trade Tattoo. Owen Jaine, a lecturer in architecture at Auckland University and an admirer of Buckminster Fuller, told Lye that his students were working on the design of a kinetic temple. And Hamish Keith was hopeful that the Auckland City Art Gallery could purchase a Lye sculpture for its new wing. Lye suggested ‘Universe’ or ‘Storm King’, and offered to keep the cost down by getting it built at the same time as the versions needed for an exhibition in Cincinnati. But Gil Docking, the new Director of the Auckland Gallery, had different priorities and Keith resigned. When Docking then wrote to Lye to ask if he had any sculpture that was not motorised, the artist realised that Auckland was still not ready for the real thing.
Meanwhile in Wellington McLeavey was doing his best to persuade the Arts Council to sponsor a lecture tour. Although the Arts Council gave the idea a better reception in 1970 than they had in 1966, the tour could not be finalised. Lye was still thinking seriously about settling in New Zealand, and though he continued to have doubts about the climate, he kept in close touch with his contacts. He was delighted to hear that the country had just produced a vigorous new political movement called the ‘Values Party’. Meanwhile several New Zealanders came up independently with the idea of making a film about Lye as a way of introducing the public to a remarkable expatriate.35 Lye kept saying he was too busy, but eventually in 1972 he agreed to let director Tony Rimmer make a half-hour documentary for the NZBC (New Zealand’s public broadcasting network). A television crew flew to New York and shot some excellent footage of the Lyes in Greenwich Village and at Warwick. Entitled Len Who?, with narration written and spoken by Hamish Keith, the documentary began by admitting that Len Lye was completely unknown so far as New Zealand reference books or people questioned in the street were concerned. But what if this unknown figure were actually one of New Zealand’s greatest artists? Peter McLeavey put that case strongly: ‘Of all the creative people in this country, he’s probably made the most important contribution to any of the arts internationally.’36 As part of the evidence of this achievement there was an interview in New York with the art critic Clement Greenberg, who said: ‘He’s made the only kinetic sculpture that has any real value — real value, artistic value, that moves you — and Lye’s kinetic sculpture happens to move me.’37 With its unusual camera angles, clever juxtapositions, and playful humour, the documentary was a good example of the new energies emerging in New Zealand film and television in the early 1970s. Lye liked the film crew but was disappointed with what they had produced, perhaps because of cheeky (but good-humoured) details such as the cartoon-style music added behind one of his speeches. But then it was never easy for film-makers to satisfy him — their work always seemed to him too conventional, mere ‘television fodder’.38 The documentary received enthusiastic reviews in Lye’s home town of Christchurch where The Press saw it as ‘a fascinating study’ of a ‘prophet without honour in his own country’.39 Unfortunately a single television programme could not rescue Lye from obscurity — he continued to be ignored by the New Zealand reference books. And even the art world had mixed feelings about him because — as one artist explained the problem — ‘We weren’t all that keen on making space for the expatriates because it was hard enough to find space for ourselves.’40