Liquid Reflections is a headlong dive into the coming-of-age of Liliane Lijn as an artist. The linear, raw narrative starts in Paris in 1958 where she lands from America. She is just eighteen and enrols in the Sorbonne and École du Louvre. The story ends in London in 1966, having taken in Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Spain and New York. As Lijn goes on her way, she transforms everything from paper to perspex, oil to water. Despite the misogyny of the art world, and view that great women artists are non-entities, she rebels against the norms, not only using kinetic text and light as art but living through it, to become an untold legend. Her pioneering artistry sits at the crossroads of light, energy, science, technology. The writing crackles with her spirit and imagination.
Lijn describes avant-garde Paris, “Nina [Thoeren] took me to the Surrealist Café where André Breton stood and kissed our hands in his old-style greeting. We met the Egyptian poet, Joyce Mansour, whose poems I then read, thrilled to have met a woman poet, and yet never managing more than a few words with her. I remember the extraordinary painter, Toyen, as almost entirely silent. The great surrealist poet Benjamin Péret was there, and a group of younger disciples, painters and writers, and on some days, Jean-Jacques Lebel [with whom she has a tormented affair].”
Lijn meets Yves Klein at the opening of Tingueley’s Drawing Machines exhibition. She is now living with the Greek artist, Takis. His sculptures use real magnets, electricity and movement, harnessing invisible forces. He also stages experimental performances blending art, music and technology.
“To open his exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery, L’impossible: Un homme dans l’éspace, Takis decided to launch a poet into space. Sinclair was to be strapped into a rudimentary steel seat and, once hoisted up near the wall-fixed electromagnet, he would hover two metres above the floor. From this precarious position, Sinclair planned to read a poem dedicated to the dismantling of all atomic weapons.”
Despite moving back to New York, her relationship with Takis continues. Lijn is beginning to work with plastics, exploring reflection, motion and light — initiating her early research into invisibility. Her Poem Machines — incorporating rotating electric motors and text — are exhibited at the Librairie Anglaise in Paris, in 1963, which she describes as being “a coming of age, a graduation from my early student phase into the active world of art.”
Lijn falls pregnant. Takis marries her after spending a whole month in New York, and returns to Paris. She does not see him again until their son is born. But then, “I felt very hurt that he couldn’t change his habits, that I and his baby son were less important to him than Corso’s gossip or his new girl, that he preferred drinking and smoking dope.”
Yet they stay together, in what is now a peripatetic, open relationship. The pair hang out with the beautiful people of the time — socialite and heiress Suna Portman, patrons like American expatriates Caresse Crosby who founded Black Sun Press with her husband — as well as notable artists and writers. He sleeps with the voluptuous poet Nazli Nour, from the world of the Beat poets. But they lead separate lives, and he humiliates her with an older wealthy girlfriend who keeps him. She briefly acquires a lover, a Danish artist, and lives in the Hôtel La Louisiane, before heading to Greece to be with her son and his nanny. Lijn’s adoring, supportive father is increasingly unhappy about his daughter’s relationship.
Lijn debunks the myth that motherhood and greatness cannot coexist as she continues along her visionary path to ever greater success, creating kinetic, text-based, feminist, technological art all in one. She embraces everything from mythology and Eastern philosophy to industrial materials, mixing them with a poetic sensibility that was decades ahead of its time. Yet for many Lijn is still under the radar.
Art history rarely plays fair with women, especially those whose work does not fit neatly into one movement or label. A unique one off, her story is fragmented and layered by sexism, rebellion, uncontainable creativity, but her belief that being both an artist and a mother is perfectly possible holds firm and shines through.
Her kinetic sculpture, Liquid Reflections, is a physical metaphor for her artistic vision: a hollow acrylic disc filled with water and two rotating acrylic balls on a motorized turntable, illuminated and animated by light and motion, responding to centrifugal and centripetal forces, creating ever-shifting patterns.
Apart from the sheer pleasure of discovering Liliane Lijn and her world — about whom I confess I knew nothing — I was drawn to her memoir because it brushes past my own history. My late mother, Gael Elton Mayo, was living and working as an artist on the Left Bank in the 1950s. She often spoke of her friend, the surrealist poetess Joyce Mansour whom Lijn recalls, though her own artistic circle was slightly different — Moïse Kisling, who painted her portrait, Bernard Buffet with whom she exhibited, Andrés Segovia, Georges Csato, Francis Tailleux . . .
Like Lijn, my mother’s creativity defied neat categorisation: painting, photography (with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim), and writing (novels and later, memoirs). But she was too restless, too peripatetic, lived too much and too fast to be claimed by any one discipline, or to stay anywhere for long. Her orbit extended from Paris to New York to London; she even exhibited with Angelica Garnett of the Bloomsbury Group in Lewes.
Connections between their worlds surface unexpectedly: my mother’s great friend Marjorie Portman was the mother of Suna and “Mikey”. Her fierce dislike of William Burroughs stemmed from his introducing Mikey to heroin — a tragedy described by Lijn.
Reading Lijn stirred a nostalgia for that carefree insouciance embodied by my mother during my childhood, when we’d simply drive off to Italy or Spain on a whim. How different from today, when red tape, visas and governments bent on monetising every border crossing make travel feel like a punishment rather than a liberation.
Cosmopolitan, bohemian, intolerant only of intolerance, both women embody a freedom and generosity of spirit that feels increasingly rare now. Immense talent and vision are not enough to succeed — they must be grounded in focus, fierce resolve and having a supportive entourage — all of which Lijn clearly possessed then, and continues to embody today. She has had important institutional recognition, with recent retrospectives travelling from Haus der Kunst in Munich to mumok Vienna, landing at Tate St Ives on until November 2025.
Liliane Lijn is a giant of kinetic and text-based art, who played with electricity and philosophy as instruments of feminist rebellion. Read Liquid Reflections. Be inspired.
The copyright to all the content of this site is held by the individual authors and creators. All rights reserved. Enquiries: please use the contact form
