Untitled (Life under the sea)

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Protozoan organisms float as if suspended between the glass plates of a microscope. Spindly-legged starfish jostle with bundles of claw-like appendages, and a pair of amoebic forms cast delicate, beaded webs over the surface of the painting. Locked in a mysterious narrative, these creatures are drawn from disparate artistic traditions, as well as from Len Lye’s extensive maritime experience and fertile imagination.

After a coastal upbringing in Cape Campbell and Wellington, Lye left New Zealand for Sydney in 1922. He spent the next four years working and travelling in Australia and the South Pacific. Following a period living in Sāmoa, he made his way to London in a steamship’s boiler room. He then continued his nautical existence by settling on a barge moored on the Thames. Lye also spent time on the island of Majorca around 1930; his drawings and book covers of this period, perhaps not surprisingly, feature aquatic organisms in various states of combat and embrace. From his childhood explorations of rock pools to these seafaring voyages, the sea always held the attraction of a mythical underworld for Lye, and traditional Western art never seemed adequate to represent it.

Lye arrived in the United Kingdom having already made close studies in libraries and museums of Māori, Aboriginal and African arts, but he was equally taken by the expressive possibilities of modernist abstraction. These interests drew him into the Seven and Five Society and the orbit of surrealism. Untitled (Life under the sea) borrows its cursive spirals from Māori pictorial conventions, while its dots and Y-shaped forms probably have Aboriginal sources. Nearly everything in the painting is built from these basic shapes, as if the artist rendered painting itself down to a few simple elements. The work’s reduction of form and colour, like the compressed, shallow space in which its fanciful creatures swim, also places it in relation to the work of many of Lye’s avant-garde contemporaries. He went on to a pioneering career in experimental film and kinetic sculpture, but perhaps uniquely among Pākehā artists in 1930, Lye combined a serious interest in non-Western art with new stylistic currents to create his own artistic language.

Tyler Cann