Out of this World
The Seven and Five Society was a London-based group of seven painters and five sculptors established in 1919 with the initial aim of encouraging traditional approaches to art. It held annual exhibitions from 1920 until 1935, and over time became more modernist in outlook. At the twelfth exhibition, at the Leicester Galleries in February 1933, the reviewer for identified Frances Hodgkins as the artist who had ‘made the most satisfactory terms between the subconscious and conscious powers involved in painting’, praising two of her entries as ‘excellent pictures’. Showing alongside Hodgkins was another New Zealander, Len Lye (1901–1980), who had arrived in London in 1926 after living for several years in Samoa and Australia. He exhibited regularly with the Society from 1927 until 1934, and on this occasion the reviewer noted only: ‘Mr. Len Lye is a good joker’, before going on to record that Henry Moore was represented by hieroglyphics of the human figure ‘which are worth a deal of study’. Such a brief comment on Lye’s contribution was not unusual; the same newspaper’s review of the Society’s But the report on the ninth exhibition, in 1929, was more enlightening, acknowledging Lye’s long-standing interest in indigenous cultures and suggesting that his ‘African-looking textiles’—which were in fact batiks—‘should suit bucolic interiors’. Anne Kirker has identified the origins of Lye’s contact with the Seven and Five Society to a number of his sculptures, among them a wooden tiki, which he had brought from Australia. These items were seen and admired by sculptor Frank Dobson, and eventually led to his introduction to Ben Nicholson, who had joined the group in 1924. Also showing in the 1933 Seven and Five Society exhibition was British painter John Aldridge (1905–1983), who received a modest mention for his painting . Lye may have met Aldridge at an earlier Society exhibition, and in the early 1930s the pair began a collaboration with Basil Taylor (1902–1935), formerly a costume designer for the Sadler’s Wells Company, to produce a science-fiction ballet.
