‘Man Ray was very intense... I wasn't shy and I was pretty and that helped'

Telegraph

18-05-2025

The American artist Liliane Lijn works in an old ­textile warehouse in north ­London, a low brick building with vast wooden doors. On a cold spring morning, she opens them dressed in silvery green, yellow and azure blue, as if she had recently escaped from a Matisse painting.
Lijn, who has lived in Britain for nearly 60 years, made her mark with the kinetic art movement in early 1960s Paris and the counterculture scene in Swinging London. Now 85, she remains a lively force, with intense eyes and a brisk ­confidence.
'Let me turn some work on,' says Lijn, as she ushers me into her ­studio, where rooms unfold around a glass courtyard. She leads the way, flicking various switches, and one artwork after another slowly grinds into action, filling the space with tocks and clicks.
Lijn has an exhibition at Tate St Ives this month, Arise Alive. It coincides with the publication of her memoir and the display of two pieces in Tate Modern's group show Electric Dreams. St Ives is the coup, though. Despite having a rich body of work and a successful career, it is her first major museum survey in Britain – and sorely overdue.
'Kinetic art was never taken seriously by the establishment,' Lijn tells me. 'It wasn't marketable and that was a problem. I had a period in the 1990s where there was practically no interest in my work. Of course it was depressing, but somehow I didn't really doubt what I was doing. I always felt I was on the right path.'
Arise Alive is conceived jointly with Haus der Kunst in Munich and Vienna's museum of modern art, Mumok. The display has been slightly adapted for St Ives by Tate director Anne Barlow, who says she believes Lijn has been 'consistently ahead of her time. Over the past six decades, her work has had significant influence. This focus on her now feels very important.'
Lijn's art is easy to like, less so to define. Typically, it takes the form of sculpture or installation, but she has also created prints, performances and a libretto. It depicts cosmological phenomena, energy, light and vibration, sometimes drawing on myths and archetypes. Words are a recurring feature, as are futuristic materials. In the 1960s that meant various plastics; today, something like aerogel, a solid that is typically 98 per cent air and is used by Nasa to collect interstellar dust.
Lijn shows me some of the work she made with it during a Nasa-funded fellowship at the Space ­Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, California, in 2005. 'Stardust' is ­hermetically sealed inside a vitrine, and breathtaking: a cluster of milky shards with blurry edges, which resembles glowing, frozen smoke.
'I broke it a lot at first,' she says. 'But they told me: everything fragments. It's important to every cosmic process, and so that became the piece.'
Nearby stands a twisting female form made of sheet mica frills – Lijn's husband of 55 years, ­Stephen Weiss, used to own a mica factory – and some Poemdrums, nested cylinders bearing words, the layers of which rotate at different speeds. They are descendants of the Poem Machines with which Lijn enraptured Paris in the 1960s: Letraset words on a motorised drum that in motion creates a pattern, 'pregnant with energy', as Lijn describes it.
Perhaps it makes sense that Lijn was drawn to make art that reflects on the forces of the cosmos. She came of age during a time of exhilarating technological and scientific advances, after all, not least the space race.
Born Liliane Segall in 1939 (she changed her name to avoid any confusion with the American pop artist George Segal), she grew up in New York, the elder child of Russian Jews who had fled Nazi Germany. Her father played the violin, her grandmother sang sad Russian songs; her mother 'did everything beautifully without any mistakes'. At home, conversation centred on literature and philosophy.
When she was 14, her family resettled in Switzerland. By 18, Lijn had left for Paris to study archaeology at the Sorbonne and art history at the Ecole du Louvre. She lasted six months. 'When I told my father I was quitting to be an artist, he said, 'Well, I should have known you would do that.''
Lijn devised her own programme of learning: long hours in museums, drawing classes with the painter and filmmaker Robert Lapoujade, evenings at the Blue Note jazz club. Of greatest importance, however, was an introduction to the surrealist cafés, via the painter Manina, the mother of a school friend.
Here, Lijn met the artists Max Ernst, Roberto Matta and Meret Oppenheim, the poet Joyce Mansour, and the grandaddy of surrealism himself, André Breton. 'He was very formal, kiss your hand, that sort of thing,' says Lijn. 'There was still a glamour attached to the group and it felt exciting to go – I had read practically everything Breton wrote – but surrealism was disintegrating. Breton had excommunicated so many. It was kind of sad, and when they just gossiped about other people, even boring. It could also be tough for women, but the thing is that I wasn't shy and I was pretty, and that helped.'
The Greek artist Takis, a former pupil of the sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi, who experimented with kinetic pieces that used magnets, was the first to take Lijn's work seriously. They married in 1961 (she taught herself Greek by reading Aristophanes with a dictionary) and had a son, Thanos, the following year. She also has a son, Mischa, and a daughter, Sheba, with Weiss.
Between 1961 and 1963, Lijn and Takis lived in New York City. She shares fragments of her time there with me: meeting Franz Kline –'but abstract expressionism was over, more or less; those artists were old heroes' – and buying so much Perspex from a store in Lower Manhattan that the owner cleared his second floor for her experiments.
On returning to Paris, Lijn began devouring scientific journals. 'I thought that with physics, which is about the very small, and astronomy, which is about the very large, I would somehow get an understanding of reality,' she tells me. 'I wanted to understand what reality was beyond the image of it, to be illuminated, in the ­Buddhist sense. That, to me, is the most important function of art.'
In 1963, she held her first solo exhibition. The great photog­rapher Man Ray visited, and was so impressed by her Poem Machines that he invited her to his studio. He was 'warm and friendly', but 'very intense'. The Beat author William S Burroughs was similarly taken, and she became a regular at the Beat Hotel. 'He wanted to make his text move off the page, and I was very excited about that. But Takis said, 'You don't want to do that', and he had a very persuasive way.'
The lack of other female artists disturbed her – 'I'd go to exhibitions and look for them' – but she found a mentor in Caresse Crosby, patron to Salvador Dalí and Ernest Hemingway. Peggy Guggenheim was another champion and friend. Lijn performed at the famed collector's 61st birthday party in Venice.
In 1966, Lijn moved to London, where she had been invited to exhibit at Signals, a new gallery dedicated to kinetic art. She drove all the way from Athens, but found Signals had shut, having lost its funding after the management criticised the Vietnam War.
John Dunbar, the 22-year-old owner of the Indica Gallery (married at the time to the crown princess of Swinging London, Marianne Faithfull) came to the rescue. He had taken on a few Signals artists and extended the offer to Lijn.
'I met Liliane through Takis,' Dunbar tells me, 'but I chose the work I showed on the basis of impulse.' He still has 8mm footage of her 1967 exhibition, which debuted the kinetic work Liquid Reflections (1966-68). Its Perspex spheres mimic planetary forces by rolling across a hollow acrylic disc of condensed liquid.
Lijn had landed on her feet: Indica was the hippest gallery in London at the time. Dunbar's co-founders were the author Barry Miles and the pop star Pete Asher (brother of Jane). Paul McCartney helped paint the walls and put up shelves, and Dunbar had recently staged Yoko Ono's first London show. Lijn recalls a dinner at which she 'chatted peace and love' with McCartney. 'He said he didn't understand why people couldn't love each other.'
Exhibitions at the Hanover Gallery in 1970 and the Serpentine in 1976 kept Lijn in London. 'I was very successful here, it was a good anchor,' she says. 'And, of course, I met Stephen.'
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In her office, with its egg-yolk-yellow floor, Lijn pulls out a box of old journals and leaves me to leaf through them. The pages are a mix of scrawled impressions, self-admonishments and fierce resolutions. 'I'm determined, that's just a character trait,' she says. She makes coffee and we sit at a table she designed herself, a circle of glass set on striped ceramic cones.
Cones have appeared in her work since the mid-1960s. She calls them 'koans', after the puzzles used in Buddhist meditation, and explains that 'all energy is emitted in a ­conical form'. Her conversation is filled with things like this – talk of ­quasars and whether the universe is mathematical, and we are mathematical beings, and that is the way we understand the cosmos.
I ask Lijn how this stash of prodigious scientific knowledge sits with her interest in myth and spirit­uality. 'Oh, quite nicely,' she replies. 'I think what many scientists think: that there are a lot of things we don't know or understand, and one of those things is con­sciousness. The unconscious is the wellspring, where all the most important discoveries are made, in science and art, and in poetry and music.'
It is her view that eventually science will understand 'the entanglement of our mind with the universe. If we're not all blown to smithereens by some idiot, that is.' She smiles. 'I hope I have a few more years.'