Len Lye

Although he became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950, much of his work went to New Zealand after his death, where it is housed at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.

Len Lye studied at Wellington High School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is film. Residence is recorded at Australia and Samoan Islands. Works named in the authority record are Wind Wand. Work by Len Lye is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Auckland Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Whitney Museum of American Art.

• Name — Len Lye • Birth Name — Leonard Charles Huia Lye • Born — 5 July 1901 • Birthplace — Christchurch, New Zealand • Died — 15 May 1980 • Place of death — Warwick, New York, U.S. • Field — Film, sculpture

As a student, Lye became convinced that motion could be part of the language of art, leading him to early (and now lost) experiments with kinetic sculpture, as well as a desire to make film. Lye was also one of the first Pākehā artists to appreciate the art of Māori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, and this had great influence on his work. In the early 1920s Lye travelled widely in the South Pacific. He spent extended periods in Australia and Samoa, where he was expelled by the New Zealand colonial administration for living within an indigenous community. • Illustration — Tusalava, a 1929 animated film by Lye Working his way as a coal trimmer aboard a steam ship, Lye moved to London in 1926. He quickly entered modernist circles, exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society from 1927 until 1934, and becoming affiliated with the Footprints Studio. Most notably, Lye exhibited in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition and began to make experimental films. Following his first animated film Tusalava, Lye began to make films in association with the British General Post Office, for the GPO Film Unit. He reinvented the technique of drawing directly on film, producing his animation for the 1935 film A Colour Box, an advertisement for "cheaper parcel post", without using a camera for anything except the title cards at the beginning of the film. It was the first direct film screened to a general audience. It was made by painting vibrant abstract patterns on the film itself, synchronising them to a popular dance tune by Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra. A panel of animation experts convened in 2005 by the Annecy Film Festival put this film among the top ten most significant works in the history of animation (his later film Free Radicals, not completed until 1979, was also in the top 50). Lye also worked for the GPO Film Unit's successor, the Crown Film Unit producing wartime information films, such as Musical Poster Number One. On the basis of this work, Lye was later offered work for The March of Time newsreel in New York. Leaving his wife and children in England, Lye moved to New York in 1944. In Free Radicals he used black film stock and scratched designs into the emulsion. The result was a dancing pattern of flashing lines and marks, as dramatic as lightning in the night sky. In 2008, this film was added to the United States National Film Registry. Lye continued to experiment with the possibilities of direct film-making to the end of his life. In various films he used a range of dyes, stencils, air-brushes, felt tip pens, stamps, combs and surgical instruments, to create images and textures on celluloid. In Color Cry, he employed the "photogram" method combined with various stencils and fabrics to create abstract patterns. It is a 16mm direct film featuring a searing soundtrack by the blues singer Sonny Terry. As a writer, Len Lye produced a body of work exploring his theory of IHN (Individual Happiness Now). He also wrote a large number of letters and poems. He was a friend of Dylan Thomas, and of Laura Riding and Robert Graves (their Seizin Press published No Trouble, a book drawn from Lye's letters to them, his mother, and others, in 1930). The NZEPC (New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre) website contains a selection of Lye's writings, which are just as surprising and experimental as his work in other media. One of his theories was that artists attempt to reproduce themselves in their works, which he exposited in an essay complete with visual examples. • Illustration — Water Whirler on the Wellington waterfront Lye was also an important kinetic sculptor and what he referred to as "Tangibles". He saw film and kinetic sculpture as aspects of the same "art of motion", which he theorised in a highly original way in his essays (collected in the book Figures of Motion). • Illustration — A 45m Wind Wand on the New Plymouth waterfront Many of his kinetic works can be found at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, Taranaki including a 45-metre high Wind Wand near the sea. The Water Whirler, designed by Lye but never realised in his lifetime, was installed on Wellington's waterfront in 2006. His "Tangibles" were shown at MOMA in New York in 1961 and are now found worldwide. In 1977, Len Lye returned to his homeland to oversee the first New Zealand exhibition of his work at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery at that time under the directorship of Ron O'Reilly. Shortly before his death in 1980, Lye and his supporters established the Len Lye Foundation, to which he gave his work. The gallery is the repository for much of this collection, employing a full-time curator to ensure its preservation and appropriate exhibition. Lye was a maverick, never fitting any of the usual art historical labels. Although he did not become a household name, his work was familiar to many film-makers and kinetic sculptors – he was something of an "artist's artist", and his innovations have had an international influence. He is also remembered for his colourful personality, amazing clothes, and highly unorthodox lecturing style (he taught at New York University for three years). The 21st century has seen renewed international interest in Lye's career with retrospectives held at the Pompidou Centre, Paris in 2000, an Australian touring exhibition organised in 2001 by the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, at ACMI, Melbourne in 2009, and at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK in 2010. Similarly, in New Zealand, surveys have been shown at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland in 2009, and City Gallery Wellington in 2013. The University of Auckland staged an opera Len Lye the opera, composed by Eve de Castro-Robinson, about his life in 2012.

Lye was married twice. His first wife was Jane (Florence Winifred) Thompson with whom he had two children: • Bix Lye, also a sculptor, who lived and worked in Williamsburg, New York and Newburgh New York. Died January 2023. • Yancy Ning Lou Lye (born 20 May 1940, Chiswick, London) In Reno, Nevada, in May 1948, Lye married his second wife, Annette "Ann" Zeiss (born 1910, Minnesota) on the same day he obtained a divorce from Jane. Ann was formerly married to Tommy Hindle, a British journalist. He died in Warwick, New York, in 1980.

• Tusalava 10 min (1929) • The Peanut Vendor 2 min (1933) • A Colour Box 4 min (1935) in Dufaycolor • Kaleidoscope 4 min (1935) in Dufaycolor • The Birth of the Robot 7 min (1936) in Gasparcolor • Rainbow Dance 5 min (1936) in Gasparcolor • Trade Tattoo (1937) 5 min in Technicolor • North or Northwest? (N or NW?) 7 min (1938) • Colour Flight 4 min (1937) in Gasparcolor • Swinging the Lambeth Walk 4 min (1939) in Dufaycolor • Musical Poster #1 3 min (1940) in Technicolor • When the Pie Was Opened 8 min (1941) • Newspaper Train 5 min (1942) • Work Party 7 min (1942) • Kill or Be Killed 18 min (1942) • Collapsible Metal Tubes 90 sec (1942) • Planned Crops 90 sec (1942) • Cameramen at War 17 min (1943) • Color Cry 3 min (1952) • Full Fathom Five 1 min (1953) • Life's Musical Minute 1 min (1953) • All Soul's Carnival 16 min (1957) • Rhythm 1 min (1957) • Free Radicals 5 min (1958, revised 1979) • Prime Time 1 min (1958) • Fountain of Hope 1 min (1959) • Particles in Space 4 min (1966) • Tal Farlow 1min 30sec (completed posthumously, 1980)