In the last two decades this peripatetic figure, who waltzed through several art movements, genres and countries, has started to become more widely recognized as a major contributor to the story of 20th-century art. Lye, who was born in New Zealand but spent most of his life in London and New York, was a pioneer of films made by painting or scratching directly onto celluloid. Lye, who loved to dance, was a restless soul who resolved early in life to make art out of restlessness itself - art that quite literally moved its audience. Lye's public obscurity may be due partly to the paradox that he chose technically complex ways to convey his vision. And although kinetic sculpture enjoyed a boom in the 1960s, it soon fell out of favor.
Many museums are ultimately happier with pieces of canvas or lumps of marble.
Another reason Lye never achieved much public recognition in his lifetime is the fact that he had two careers. When Lye started making kinetic sculpture, the people who had known him as a filmmaker didn't go over the wall with him. And the people who knew him as a kinetic sculptor didn't know much about his films. That Lye did not achieve a breakthrough in the '60s, when his kinetic sculpture was exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere, may also be due to the very single-mindedness that drove his work. But he wasn't an easy man.