"Stopped Short" gathers Wystan Curnow’s key writings on the work of multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer Len Lye (1901–80), best known for his dazzling experimental films and kinetic sculptures – parallel expressions of his desire to create an art of motion. Along with offering a wealth of insights into Lye’s work, this volume is also a study in reception, meditating on Lye’s place in world art, his place in Aotearoa New Zealand art, and the shifting relationship between them.For five decades, Wystan Curnow has been an advocate for—and authority on—the works of filmmaker and sculptor Len Lye. Alongside his friend and sometime collaborator Roger Horrocks, Curnow has championed the Aotearoa New Zealand–born artist’s work and driven its growing popular and critical recognition.

The first half of the book first half centres on his discovery of Lye’s work in New York; the second explores its repatriation to Lye’s homeland where the establishment of the Len Lye Foundation and a dedicated Len Lye Centre in Ngāmotu New Plymouth has cemented Lye’s significance within Aotearoa New Zealand art history. Each half is introduced by Curnow, reflecting back on his earlier writings.Born in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Len Lye spent time in Australia and Sāmoa in the early 1920s, before working his passage to London in 1926. There he became part of the modern-art scene, exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society and in the 1936 Internationalist Surrealist Exhibition.He made his first film, Tusalava, in 1929 and went on to make films for the GPO Film Unit and Crown Film Unit utilising a variety of experimental techniques, often painting directly on film. In 1944 Lye moved to New York to work for the newsreel The March of Time. In the 1950s he began making films by scratching directly into black-leader film stock, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, he developed motorised kinetic works he coined tangible motion sculptures. Examples are held in US collections such as the Whitney Museum of Americal Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and Berkeley Art Museum.

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