Body Of Work (Mick Brown feature article published in Telegraph Magazine)

The following is a slightly longer version of the article that was published in the Telegraph Magazine on Saturday 9 October 2004. This version includes a few things that were subsequently edited out of the final version.

It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Telegraph Magazine. Copyright and all rights remain the property of Mick Brown.

Body Of Work

When Robert Lenkiewicz died in his bed in August 2002 at the age of 60 of heart failure, there was some discussion among his wide circle of friends and acquaintances as to whether he was really dead at all.

Lenkiewicz, after all, had already ‘died’ once before, twenty years earlier. Reasoning that while he could not know what it was like to be dead, but that he could at least know what it was like to be thought dead, he had arranged for an announcement of his passing to be placed in the local newspaper and then vanished for three days, hiding out in the house of a friend and observing the effect of his untimely demise on the world, while painting portrait of himself in a full-length mirror.

Only when it became necessary to fulfil the necessary legal obligations - where’s the body? - did Lenkiewicz reveal himself, appearing before a clamour of reporters in his Plymouth studio, and issuing a quick statement before excusing himself to go to the bathroom, quietly locking the door behind him as he went. It was some two hours before the assembled company were able to escape.

Death was one of Lenkiewicz’s abiding interests. Among the various artefacts which his estate was obliged to consider following his death were Lenkiewicz’s singular collection of skulls and coffins, the skeleton of a 16th century witch, and the embalmed body of Edward McKenzie, a Plymouth tramp whom Lenkiewicz discovered living in a concrete container overlooking a local rubbish tip, and named ‘Diogenes’, after the philosopher who lived in a barrel. For several years, the intractable Diogenes, a former flyweight boxer, was among Lenkiewicz’s closest companions, often standing sentinel at the door to the painter’s studio, demanding 10p from anybody bold enough to venture across the threshold.

When Diogenes died in a Plymouth hospital in 1982, Lenkiewicz, the attentive friend, was at his bedside. No sooner had the death rattle silenced than Lenkiewicz wrapped the corpse in a sheet, and carried it on his shoulder out into the night. It was embalmed by a fellow of the British Institute of Embalmers.

When the matter eventually came to the attention of the local health inspectorate, Lenkiewicz was obliged to produce the body. He arranged a showing in his studio. When the coffin was opened with due ceremony, Lenkiewicz himself jumped out, crying ‘Habeus corpus!’.

The matter was quietly forgotten.

Lenkiewicz was a man who designed his life, as one friend puts it, as ‘a bravura performance’. He was a big man, with an enormous barrel chest and ‘colossally strong’, the legacy of his years spent doing occasional work on building sites to support himself.

He affected a cavalier appearance - almost a parody of the artist at large; a turbulent mass of tangled, shoulder length hair, an unruly beard; he invariably dressed in a smock, his baggy trousers tucked into fisherman’s ‘ten league’ boots, an aroma of oil paint and turpentine trailing behind him like a plume. He spoke in a soft, beautifully modulated whisper, which had the effect of drawing people closer to him; women, in particular, found this bewitching. ‘Robert had huge charisma; he would totally command a room’, remembers one friend, adding an odd detail: whenever he sat, Lenkiewicz would habitually cover his genitals, with a scarf, a hat, a book; a curious tic, but telling, perhaps, of the libidinous strain that coursed through Lenkiewicz’s personality. He would claim to have had between two and three thousand relationships in his life-time - a high proportion of them, he would add ‘very agreeable’ - and to have fathered up to 19 children (estimates vary) by a variety of different women.

For the 30 years that Robert Lenkiewicz lived and painted in Plymouth, he enjoyed a peculiar love-hate relationship with the city. Initially an object of suspicion and reproval, his shows had been threatened with closure, his works with confiscation; he had even spent a short time in jail. But in later years he came to be embraced as something of a vieux terrible, a familiar figure to locals and to tourists on the Barbican, where his studio was located, an eccentric adornment in a city not noted for its artistic life. More than 800 people attended his memorial service at the Plymouth Guildhall, which had been organised by the City Council, where the actress Lesley Joseph read out lines from two poems written by Lenkiewicz, Thoughts on Death and My Gout.

As a painter Lenkiewicz was all but unrecognised nationally. He exhibited only once outside Plymouth, and the only review his work ever received in the pages of a national newspaper was a spoof - a facsimile of a notice in the Times, which was distributed to people arriving for an exhibition in his studio bluntly entitled ‘Paintings to Make Money’. The notice damned Lenkiewicz as ‘utterly void of talent and creative force’, and warned that ‘those who purchase from him for taste are shallow, those who purchase from him for investment fools.’ Lenkiewicz had written it himself.

In fact, to outward appearances at least, making money was something that he appeared to have no particular gift, or indeed interest, in doing. He was a prolific painter, executing literally thousands of works, but for most of his life showed no palpable enthusiasm for selling his work. Throughout his life, he had striven to give all who knew him the impression that he was a penniless, struggling artist. He spent nothing on food, habitually eating in any one a number of local cafes where painting the proprietor or a wall-mural had ensured free meals for life.

‘Occasionally, you’d encounter him with £1,000 in his hand, but it was never there for more than five minutes’, recalls one friend. ‘He was improvident in that way. If someone came up to him with a good story, Robert would always give them enough money to sort it out.’

Nobody was particularly surprised to discover on his death, that Lenkiewicz had left precisely £40 - found in a saucepan. There was some astonishment, however, when it was revealed that his estate had been valued at some £6.3m. As well as hundreds of his paintings, this included a collection of more than 25,000 books, He also left behind a mountain of debts.

Before his death Lenkiewicz had expressed a desire to see his paintings and books collected together as a permanent resource for Plymouth. But over the last two years, hundreds of his art-works and books have been sold off, to the point that there are real fears that soon nothing will be left to comprise the sort of collection which Lenkiewicz himself envisaged. Later this month (OCTOBER 25th) in Exeter, a further 450 paintings and an assortment of artefacts, including studio props, palettes, easels, and a number of skulls and mummified animals will be coming up for auction. The body of Diogenes will not be among them.

As a painter, Lenkiewicz was honest about his own short-comings: he described himself ‘the best bad painter I know’. His figurative style, recognisably influenced by the old masters he had venerated since childhood - Rembrandt, Leonardo, Brueghel - was conventional, and in art-market terms old-fashioned. At their best his paintings emanated a dark and brooding intensity, at worst they veer dangerously towards chocolate box kitsch. But they are better understood as illustrations for what Lenkiewicz called his ‘projects’ - investigations into the human condition in general, and into the condition of Robert Lenkiewicz in particular.

He completed 21 such projects in his lifetime, on such subjects as Vagrancy, Mental Handicap, Love and Romance, Jealousy, Orgasm and Addictive Behaviour, each comprised of paintings, sketches, notebooks and diaries. Taken together, they provide an encyclopaedia of his abiding obsessions, and constitute one of the most singular, and curious, bodies of work of any British artist of modern times.

Lenkiewicz’s parents were European Jewish émigrés who settled in London after the war, and ran a boarding house in North London - the Hotel Shemtov - inhabited by elderly refugees like themselves, many of them survivors of the concentration camps. It was an environment that introduced him to mental illness, suffering and death from an early age. Lenkiewicz would later liken it to ‘a lunatic asylum’. A solitary boy he escaped into painting, executing portraits of the hotel’s residents, and making anatomical drawings of pigeons which he would dissect after pinning them to a wardrobe door.

He studied at St Martin’s College of Art, then the Royal Academy, moving on to live in a variety of squats and derelict spaces, painting frantically, and occasionally teaching in schools to make ends meet. In an echo of life at the Hotel Shemtov, he began to gather around him the difficult and the disturbed - alcoholics and vagrants that he would paint in return for food and shelter.

When the local police eventually suggested that he might wish to relocate himself somewhere else, Lenkiewicz moved on, firstly to Cornwall, and then, in 1970, to Plymouth, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

He took a studio on the Barbican, where he patched together a living drawing tourist portraits at £3 a time, at the same time giving sanctuary to a new assortment of tramps and dossers in his studio - characters like Albert Fisher, better known as ‘The Bishop’, Cockney Jim and Les ‘Cider’ Ryder. Lenkiewicz painted them and listened to their stories; he took it upon himself to commandeer vacant warehouses and derelict properties where they could squat - at one point there were nine such premises in Plymouth - and arranged with local hospitals and charities to provide beds and mattresses. He funded an annual Christmas Day dinner at a Plymouth bus station (an institution which would continue until his death). He would also send them out, ‘like Fagin’, as one friend recalls, to ‘recover things’ - lead stripped from old buildings, church doors, or books for his own library. At the age of 25, Lenkiewicz himself was convicted of stealing books from The City Museum in Plymouth - he would claim, to pay for the dossers’ food.

As a young man, Lenkiewicz had been strongly influenced by the example of Albert Schweitzer, and had dreamed of being, as he once put it, ‘an artist saint’. But he always vehemently denied that there was any hint of altruism about his work with the tramps and derelicts of Plymouth. It may have had the effect of highlighting the plight of people living on the margins of society, even alleviating it, but his intentions, he maintained, were purely ‘aesthetic’, to build ‘a body of information’.

‘I don’t for one moment even want to hint at suggesting that I am concerned for the welfare of another human being; to me that would be blind, ignorant, insensitive and thuggish.’

Lenkiewicz, it would be fair to say, abhorred sentiment and distrusted human feeling. Over the years he would formulate a philosophy based on his twin obsessions of aesthetics and addiction, which he would call ‘aesthetic fascism’, and which would form the basis of all his work. Lenkiewicz believed that ‘there is only addictive behaviour’, and that everyone, at any time, is simply somewhere along the spectrum ‘of all possible intensities’. At its most apparent, this may be addiction to alcohol or drugs - Lenkiewicz abhorred both. The addiction to people or ideas, he believed, was more insidious, leading to extreme or fascistic behaviour. In the matter of love, the relationship one is having, he believed, is essentially with oneself - an addiction to one’s own ‘aesthetic vulnerability’ - rather than having anything to do with anyone else. What begins as attraction inevitably becomes an entanglement of expectation and possessiveness, the projection of one’s dreams onto others, then blame and recrimination for their failure to fulfil them - ‘thoughtlessness, brutishness and fascism’.

‘Romantic love’ - what he described as ‘the whole "two becoming one" schmaltz’ - was a hoax; the idea of self-less love merely self-deception.

‘This idea that love and romance are some kind of profound event...Robert almost made it his life’s work to prove the opposite’, remembers one former lover.

‘I can certainly recognise it and detect the sensations’, Lenkiewicz once said. ‘I can even sense the process of being moved by it; but it’s as though I’m watching it from the outside - its just a piece of machinery doing this. It brings about what I call "the visceral smile’’.’

Lenkiewicz was married three times, but he made it a point never to live with his wives, sundry partners, or his numerous off-spring. ‘To inflict oneself upon another human being for long periods of time’ as he put it, was ‘unkind. It’s called ‘ the beautiful lie’.

Fidelity, he believed, was ‘physiologically impossible’. He offered an ingenious rationale for this. If it was true that the body alters on a cellular level in almost every way every three to seven months, then you were physically a different person three times a year, and your partner the same, ‘So both of you already physically slept with three to four different people a year in the same bed.’ Ergo, it seemed, you might as well sleep with anybody and everybody. It was a principle to which Lenkiewicz applied himself with heroic endeavour and - incredibly, perhaps - considerable success. ‘Women love attention’, says one friend, ‘and Lenk could do attention in 30 seconds. And two hours later they were on their way having had a major experience.’

Lenkiewicz appeared to regard these relationships, as all else in his life, as ‘inquiries’, grist for a work-in-progress.

His most intense relationship, it seemed, was with himself, his emotional life ‘principally contained in using myself as guinea pig with the notes that I do in private studios - what I call ‘deep sea diving’.

The most remarkable of these grew out of his relationship with a girl known simply as ‘Mary’ - a relationship which Lenkiewicz seemed to have initiated, almost in the manner of a laboratory experiment, purely to test the parameters of his own obsession.

Mary was 17, and working in a local Co-op, and Lenkiewicz 36 when they first met. He would later note that it was the most intense example of ‘genuine aesthetic addiction’, or - as he would ironically add - ‘what is traditionally called "love at first sight".’ that he had ever experienced. The feeling, it seems, was anything but mutual. Lenkiewicz set out to woo her. On one occasion he hired a horse-drawn carriage and driver in livery, filled the carriage with a thousand daffodils and arrived at the art college where she was then studying. ‘She cringed. She got in and we drove on to Cap’n Jaspers sea-front take-away where I had arranged for a table and chairs to be produced with a flourish on our arrival. I don’t think she enjoyed it at all.’

The gesture, he explained, was probably inspired by the spaghetti-eating scene in The Lady and the Tramp - a film of which he was improbably fond.

It would be four years before the relationship was consummated. Lenkiewicz would record their every encounter in minute detail, meticulously noting each emotional shiver and physical tremor with an almost clinical detachment, and illustrating each page in hallucinatory vivid watercolours. The Mary Notebook, as it would become known, is a disturbingly compelling document - the passive, reluctant, bemused young girl, and Lenkiewicz himself, ‘like Satan trying to ground an angel’, as he would later put it. It takes on an even greater charge when one learns that Mary was completely unaware that she was being used merely as the subject for this ‘inquiry’, only finding this out shortly before The Notebook and a large number of paintings that Lenkiewicz had done of her were being assembled for an exhibition, The Painter With Mary: A Study of Obsessional Behaviour. (She eventually became his third wife, but the marriage failed and she left Plymouth in the mid-80s).

Lenkiewicz kept similar, if not so extensive diaries of many of his relationships, and insisted his partners did the same, encouraging to them to write, and paint, their impressions ‘right up to the point of orgasm’. By his own reckoning, he accumulated several hundred such accounts.

‘Robert was a very secretive man, but then he needed to be’, remembers Francis Mallet, a friend who runs a gallery and printing press in Plymouth, which has published limited editions of ‘The Mary Notebook’ and a monograph about Lenkiewicz’s life and work.

‘I think a lot of people felt in a position of particular privilege and intimacy with him. And if they’d have realised that a lot of other people felt exactly the same way, there’d have been havoc. He had his life very compartmentalized, and he had a very efficient appointment system. ‘

One of his lovers, the painter Karen Ciambriello, offered a pointed illustration of this; a painting of a tower, with a different woman at each window, at the bottom stands Lenkiewicz, clutching a handful of keys.

Lenkiewicz had an ambivalent attitude to fame and success. He enjoyed telling the story of how at one point in the late 70s he had been approached by an art-dealer who offered to build his career as a social portrait painter. He secured two commissions - one from Vere Harmsworth the chairman of Associated Newspapers, and a second from the holiday camp magnate, Billy Butlin. Lenkiewicz posed Harmsworth in a grandfather wing chair, taking pains not to let anyone see the work in progress. At length, a small reception was held to unveil the painting; the cloth was pulled back to reveal a picture of the press baron masturbating on a copy of the Daily Mail. Butlin was painted on a full size canvas, almost submerged under a torrent of litter, chip-wrappings and tat - Lenkiewicz’s view of the holiday camp experience. It was the end of his attempts to be a social portraitist.

He showed no interest or of courting the attention of the London arts media.

‘Robert didn’t want to be beholden to anybody else - a gallery or a dealer’, says Yana Travail, a friend for almost 30 years, who latterly managed Lenkiewicz’s studio. ‘He wanted to be totally free to follow his own path.’

Nor did he show any interest in selling his work beyond Plymouth, or courting the attention of the London arts media.

‘I think there was an element of Robert enjoying being a big fish in a small pool’, says the Earl of St. Germans, another close friend who became one of Lenkiewicz's principal patrons.

‘He was not ease with posh or social people. He’d want to blind them with his knowledge in a rather didactic way. It was nervousness. for some 30 years.

St. Germans first met Lenkiewicz in the early 70s, when the painter was at work on a 3,000 square ft mural on the outside wall of his studio in the Barbican, featuring a cast of local characters and on the theme, he would explain to passers-by, of the influence on Jewish thought on Elizabethan philosophy, 1580-1620. (The mural is still there, if much faded.)

St. Germans is the owner of Port Eliot, a stately home near Liskeard in Cornwall, and the ancestral seat of his family for the past 600 years. Impressed by Lenkiewicz’s work, St Germans invited him to execute a mural in the largest room in the house - ‘the Round Room’, which is 40ft in diameter and dates from the 18th century. Lenkiewicz agreed, in return for St.Germans paying for a new roof for his Barbican studio. ‘I ended up paying on the rent on it for years.’

It was a commission that was to last until the painter’s death. The Round Room is one of most remarkable of all his works. Lenkiewicz called it ‘the Riddle Picture’ - devising the painting as a series of clues. It is divided into two broad themes - the Deluge/Hell, and Paradise, executed as a riotous collage: mythical creatures and Arcadian gardens, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a falling Lucifer, life-size portraits of St. German’s family and friends; and a representation of the Last Supper, showing the historian A.L. Rowse (a friend of the St. Germans family) surrounded by eleven of Lenkiewicz’s friends and lovers. (The painter himself appears in the work, holding his own severed head).

Lenkiewicz executed compendious notes and drawings as preparation for the painting itself. Poring over them in the library at Port Eliot, one realises the extraordinary breadth of scholarship that he brought to his work. There are commentaries on mediaeval myth and alchemy, Cabalistic thought, the symbolism of Pierrot and Harlequin, pages of studies of Raphael’s technique for drawing folds in cloth, the writings of Meister Eckhart, disquisitions on dragons, griffins and the best way to catch a unicorn (According to Honorius of Autun, writing in the Speculum de Mysteriis ecclesiiae’ ‘...a virgin is put in a field; the animal then comes to her and is caught because it lies down in her lap.’ )

Hardly any of this extraordinary body of recondite knowledge and whimsy seems to have found its way into the painting itself, which is so replete with symbolism that Lenkiewicz admitted that by the end even he had completely lost sight of the answer to the riddle.

St Germans gave Lenkiewicz complete carte blanche for the subject matter. ‘My only stipulation was that it had to be decent’. It was only some years into the work that he realised that an arrow being fired from the bow of a mythical Knight Rider, was actually a huge penis, apparently aimed at the exquisitely painted head of one of St. German’s friends, the writer Candida Lycett Green. ‘I got him to change it.’

Over the course of some 30 years, Lenkiewicz would turn up at irregular intervals at Port Eliot, take occupancy of the Round Room for a week or so, painting for 18 or 20 hours a day - neither coming out, nor letting St Germans in - and then leave. He invariably had one of a number of women in tow. ‘Eventually I barred them’, remembers St Germans, ‘because it distracted him from the painting’. For years, St Germans was unable to use the room at all. In gentle exasperation, he wrote to Lenkiewicz asking when the work might be completed. Lenkiewicz replied, citing the case of Constantine Huygens who had commissioned Rembrandt at the age of 21 and received a mere half a dozen illustrations in return before ceasing his patronage. ‘How regrettable, he later pined, that he lacked the good sense to encourage distractions, dilly-dallying, anything to extend the agreement to a further 50 years and collect the Cyndips, the Jewish Bride or Prodigal Son instead.... How fickle the failure to see the ideal patron as one who accepts this relationship as the work of art.’

‘Lenk was a charlatan’, says St Germans. ‘But in the best possible sense of the word. He was just so convincing in the way he approached life, everybody felt better for knowing him.’

The Riddle Picture was never completed. Lenkiewicz had long suffered from ill-health - he underwent a heart by-pass operation in the 90s, and he died on the day before he was due to return to Harefield hospital for further treatment.

In his last years, he had succumbed to an addiction of his own - bibliomania. It had long been the case that every penny he made from his painting went towards books. But from the mid-90s Lenkiewicz calculatedly began to paint what one friend calls ‘girlie pictures’ - romanticised studies of voluptuous and scantily robed young women - to fund his obsession. His sales, and prices, rose exponentially. With the proceeds he acquired a deconsecrated church overlooking Plymouth Hoe and converted it into a library - ‘it looked like a set for a crank bibliomaniac dressed by Disney’, remembers the Earl of St Germans. There he accumulated thousands of volumes on theology and philosophy. His studio on the Barbican housed yet more - books on the holocaust, euthanasia and suicide in the ‘death room’ upstairs; with separate rooms devoted to erotica, and his large collection of books on the occult, witchcraft and alchemy.

In his will, Lenkiewicz left modest bequests to a number of his friends and 11 of his children (the mothers of three of them, who are minors, have made an application for financial provision from the estate). He left the entire collection of his books to a charity, the Lenkiewicz Foundation Trust, which had been set up before his death by a committee of friends with the intention of preserving a permanent collection of both books and paintings for the city of Plymouth. A subsidiary charity, the Lenkiewicz Foundation, was established at the same time, to manage the collections, mount exhibitions and promote research into the areas which had interested Lenkiewicz throughout his life.

His estate was initially valued at around £6.3m; of that his paintings were valued for probate at £2.5m; his library at £3.5m. Only later would it be realised that this was a huge over-valuation, and the true worth of his library was actually closer to £1m. Lenkiewicz’s thirst for books had often led to him to pay wildly over their true value.

Set against that were some 160 personal claims, including outstanding rent on his various properties, and money which had been paid in advance for portraits which were never completed, or even started. Lenkiewicz had a habit of accepting commissions and promptly forgetting about them. ‘It was a rolling programme’, says the Estate’s executor, Peter Walmsley. One book dealer has lodged a claim for an outstanding debt of £300,000.

Taken together, these claims amounted to £1.6m. A tax bill is still to be finalised. With additional administrative costs for lawyers, security on his properties and so on, the total debts on the Estate are likely to exceed £3m.

In an attempt to settle these debts, and consolidate a collection for posterity, the Estate have already held two sales of paintings and books.

A sale of 150 paintings at Sotheby’s last September raised some £542,000 net; a second sale, of some 500 books, in November a further £488,700, net. This sale included the most valuable of Lenkiewicz’s collection of philosophical and occult books; among them was a copy of Hobbes’ Leviathan, published in 1651, and a 15th century edition of the Malleus Maleficarum - the book which gave eccliastical blessing to the witch-hunts. The forthcoming sale in Exeter, is expected to raise another £500-700,000. But Walmsley admits that further sales will be necessary to clear the debts.

The gradual dissolution of Lenkiewicz’s estate has caused some anger in Plymouth, where it is feared that so much of his work will eventually need to be sold that little or nothing will be left for a permanent collection.

‘It’s very much touch and go’, says Annie Hill-Smith, the chairman of the Lenkiewicz Foundation Trust, who believes that it will be necessary to raise a further £2m to secure and house the kind of collection which was always envisaged.

The Trust have applied for Lottery and European Regional Development funding, but Hill-Smith admits the future is uncertain. ‘There is a real danger the whole collection will be dispersed. What we desperately need is someone who understands Robert’s enormous importance as a painter and a thinker.’ A special appeal is being launched to purchase from the Estate Lenkiewicz’s huge narrative painting of Plymouth life, The Temptation of St Antony. ‘It would a real tragedy if that was lost’, says Hill -Smith

Lenkiewicz’s final legacy may be the kind of discomfort and confusion that he so much enjoyed provoking throughout his life.

‘To be honest’ says Yana Trevail, ‘I don’t think, Robert gave two hoots what happened after he died. It was the same with his painting - I think on one level, he would have loved to be recognised; but he always believed you’re not doing it for criticism or applause; that the doing of the work was its own justification. All that Robert really wanted was to make his life interesting to himself.’

Photos from: ‘A Portrait of Robert Lenkiewicz: Photographs by Dr Philip Stokes’, to be published next year by White Lane Press. www.robertlenkiewiczpublications.co.uk

The sale of Lenkiewicz paintings and artefacts takes place on October 23rd at the Westpoint Exhibition Centre, Exeter.

Detaiols from Bearne’s of Exeter: 01392 207000.

Lenkiewicz On Vagrancy - The Big Issue Feb 2007

On 5 February 2007 The Big Issue published an 8 page supplement on Lenkiewicz to mark the launch of a major exhibition of his work at The Halcyon Gallery in London.

White Lane Press have kindly allowed us to make this feature available for download from this website. It is in pdf format, and can be downloaded here.

If you would like to support The Big Issue, you can make a donation via their website.

Lust For Life (feature article published in the Independent on Sunday)

The following is the feature article that was published in the Independent on Sunday on 7 August 2005. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Independent on Sunday. Copyright and all rights remain the property of Independent on Sunday:

Lust For Life
By Mike Higgins

There aren’t many reasons for remembering the painter Robert Oskar Lenkiewicz, who died three years ago. To the art world, he was a minor portraitist. He painted largely figuratively, with embarrassing emotion. Prodigiously too - he was thought to have produced 10,000 drawings and paintings over his lifetime. At the time of his death you could have picked up one of his better works for £5,000 or so. He chose for most of his adult life to live in Plymouth, and therefore, provincial purdah. As it is, Lenkiewicz is probably most widely remembered for the eccentric act of embalming a tramp in 1984. The Times’ obituary declared that “his gift for self-publicity considerably outran his skills with the brush or the pencil.”

In Plymouth, where I grew up, Lenkiewicz’s reputation had a bit more life to it. He had affairs with his models! He slept in a coffin! He was a necrophiliac! He lived with dossers! And if you wanted to know the truth about him, you could usually go and ask him yourself. With his mane of greying hair, his fireman’s boots and fisherman’s smock, he was pleasingly conspicuous around town, in and out of Joe Prete’s cafe on the Barbican and striding between his studios (my dad nearly ran him over once). His appearance - he embodied the visual cliché of “the artist” - was deceptive, though. By the time Lenkiewicz died in August 2002, at the age of 60, the citizens of this sleepy Devon city and the wild artist son of European immigrants had, over four stormy decades, collaborated to produce an astonishing grand project of social art. And today one man is endangering our appreciation of this legacy. That man is Lenkiewicz himself.

Little in Lenkiewicz’s background suggests that Plymouth would become his home. He was born in 1941 and he grew up at the Hotel Shemtov, which his Jewish parents ran in Cricklewood, north London. They had fled Poland and Germany in 1939 and after the war the hostel’s 60 rooms were mostly filled with elderly European refugees, many of whom had survived the Nazi camps. “A lunatic asylum,” Lenkiewicz called it.

He began to paint at a young age and rattled through St Martin’s College of Art and the Royal Academy, at odds with most of his peers and tutors - while Rothko, Jasper Johns and their abstract-expressionist peers held aesthetic sway, Lenkiewicz attempted to emulate Velazquez, Goya and Rembrandt. By 1964 he was married to his first wife, who took him down to her home in Cornwall. Before long, though, Lenkiewicz was offered a studio in Plymouth, on the Barbican, the rough home of south Devon’s fishing fleet.

He set about personifying the stereotype of the bohemian artist, living in crumbling houses with various partners and assorted dossers. He fenced stolen goods, hawked Old Master copies he’d dashed off. But it was his sex life that most scandalised Plymouth. By his death, Lenkiewicz had married three times, fathered 11 children and claimed to have slept wit 3.000 women: “I look forward to the day,” he once said, “when the court of human rights regards it an imprisonable offence for anyone to live with anybody else for more than a fortnight.”

About the only aspect of Lenkiewicz that was conventional was, perhaps surprisingly, his style of painting. He specialised in the figurative single or group portrait, and with some success. He painted Terry Waite, Billy Connolly and Michael Foot, among others. And he worked swiftly - he would often grind through 11 sittings in a day, and sketch rapid likenesses for anyone who wandered in off the street. He painted big, too. There was a 364-ft. epic while at St Martins; the enormous Round Room mural at Lord Eliot’s estate in Cornwall; the 40 ft-long Temptation of St Antony that had to be removed from his studio by crane in 1994; not to mention several public murals around the city.

To cap the image of the struggling artist, he would often pay for his bills in oils. The result was that his work can still be found in homes across Plymouth, from council semis to grand Victorian villas. A friend of my family had done some building work for the artist and received one of their collection of three Lenkiewiczes as payment in kind. One was of some boys mooching around, called, I think, Barbican Boys, another an apparently unfinished painting of starving Biafran children. The last was a portrait he’d commissioned, of his two sons. This was the first “proper” art I remember seeing outside a gallery and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

Why did Lenkiewicz paint with such abandon, particularly when many of the results were, frankly, poor? Because he knew he wasn’t in the first rank of painters - Lenkiewicz himself said he was “the best bad painter I know”. According to his partner and sometime model in the Nineties, Anna Navas: “He used to say that every century produces two or three great painters and he knew that he was nowhere near that good, so what was the point in worrying about it?” Instead, Lenkiewicz turned his conventional style and his unconventional mind towards a much more ambitious portrait, one that was 30 years in the making and still unfinished at his death: a portrait of Plymouth.

“I’m not an unhinged necrophiliac littering the city with children,” he once said, “I write social enquiry reports.” Between 1973 and his death in 2002, Lenkiewicz undertook 21 of these reports or “Projects”. Their subjects varied, from the obviously social - homelessness, mental disability, old age - to the less apparently so - death, jealousy, sexual behaviour. Each was years in the completion, involving the production of dozens or, occasionally, hundreds of paintings and an accompanying booklet in which Lenkiewicz’s research interviews, notes and forthright views were published.

His first Project, and one of his most powerful, was on vagrancy. It was exhibited in 1973 and was the culmination of Lenkiewicz’s lifelong interest in down-and-outs of all sorts. Soon after his arrival in Plymouth in the mid-Sixties, Lenkiewicz and some local vagrants started squatting a series of old warehouses, the so-called Cowboy Holiday Inns. (Interestingly, the “Inns” were by and large tolerated in Plymouth - Lenkiewicz had done much the same in Swiss Cottage in the early Sixties when, he says, he soon found himself run out of the neighbourhood by the police.)

A council representative turned up to the Project’s opening night and, surrounded by over a hundred of Lenkiewicz’s large, stark portraits of Plymouth’s destitute, gave a speech in thanks that Plymouth was fortunate not to have a vagrancy problem. “It was at that point,” remembered Lenkiewicz, “that I gave a prearranged signal and 73 dossers entered the room, most of them drunk, and they wrecked the evening.” The incident is caught, along with many others, in the lovely photographic account of Lenkiewicz at work from the early Seventies onwards, A Portrait of Robert Lenkiewicz: Photographs by Dr Philip Stokes.

The Vagrancy Project was the first proper illustration of Lenkiewicz’s ethos: “I was very unattracted to the idea of the artist intensively trying to represent all his thoughts, feelings about something in one image. To me there was more humility in one hundred images that didn’t worry about high art.”

Neither were the comments of Diogenes, Doc, Cockney Jim, the Irish Compressor in the booklet accompanying the Project an afterthought. They are by turns pathetic – “You wake up in the morning, you put your hand in your pocket, is there enough, enough for a bottle, a bottle, a bottle?” – and darkly funny - “Always keep the creases in your trousers - but don’t shit ‘em; that will take the creases out.” Today, of course, the Project as a whole cannot be experienced. But, 32 years after it was published, the booklet still provides a striking context for the paintings. It’s also a harrowing, evocative passage of social history, with its tales of invalided dockyard workers and down-and-out servicemen who never recovered from the war.

For the next 30 years, Lenkiewicz’s Projects served up his often tart views on Plymouth, and yet Plymothians kept volunteering themselves as the raw ingredients. For instance, in his mid-Eighties Project, Observations on Local Education, Lenkiewicz was unequivocal: “Some of the sitters became quite upset when they read my preface, which made the claim that contemporary education was not dissimilar to aspects of the Holocaust. That’s an extraordinary claim but I did tend to feel that it was about the mass spiritual slaughter of the young on a huge scale.”

By contrast, perhaps the most personal and extraordinary of the Projects was The Painter with Mary (A Study of Obsessional Behaviour). Mary was a 17-year-old girl who worked in the Co-op in Plymouth when the 36-year-old Lenkiewicz declared his infatuation with her. Lenkiewicz recorded his obsession with Mary in text, drawings, paintings, often in explicit sexual detail. The painter, who was a tireless self-portraitist anyway, then laid these feelings and their relationship bare in The Mary Notebook. After a few years, the two of them married - and soon divorced.

Lenkiewicz always insisted that one theory linked these disparate-seeming Projects: that we’re all trapped in destructive behavioural loops, be they of love or power or jealousy. He called this theory “aesthetic fascism”: “All the Projects have one feature in common: they are based on the suggestion that patterns of human behaviour are aesthetic experiences, a matter of taste ... I do not think there’s any line of enquiry of greater importance than to study the physiological - not the psychological - cause of addictive behaviour.”

And where better to test this theory than this “rather naive city”? But Lenkiewicz wasn’t merely observing and recording we Plymothians, he was trying to rouse us from what he saw as our complacency. The impact of the booklets and paintings of the exhibited Projects was one method, but so too were the elaborate pranks that Lenkiewicz enjoyed. And these, more often than the Projects, made the news. There was the time, in 1981, that he announced his own death in The Times; and the lecture he delivered, incognito as a frail, elderly academic, to local old age-care health professionals.

Most notorious, of course, was the incident that made Lenkiewicz’s name around the world: the embalming of Diogenes. When Lenkiewicz met Edward McKenzie in the late Sixties, he had been living for nine years in a concrete barrel overlooking a rubbish dump near Plymouth (hence his nickname). On McKenzie’s death in 1984, and at his request, Lenkiewicz had his friend embalmed. After a few weeks, the authorities demanded entry to the painter’s studios in pursuit of the McKenzie’s remains. They quickly found a coffin, prised it open... whereupon Lenkiewicz sat up wrapped in a duvet and clutching a hotwater bottle, holding a sign on which was written “HABEAS CORPUS”.

“Robert didn’t do things just for the sake of it,” says Annie Hill-Smith, the chair of The Lenkiewicz Foundation, a charity established to safeguard the artist’s legacy. “Robert did things almost always … to promote change.” In this way the embalming of Diogenes could be seen as Lenkiewicz’s final contribution to the Vagrancy Project. He noted at the time that the authorities had been far quicker to take an interest in McKenzie in death than they had been in life. Diogenes’ body was found among Lenkiewicz’s belongings after the artist’s death.

Stunts such as this invariably infuriated the local authorities, which in itself endeared “Mr Lannervitch” to many Plymothians. And despite his predictably anti-bourgeois pronouncements on the nature of charity - “I am revolted by any notion of altruism” - his generosity, frequently anonymous, was known around the city. For instance, he organised the annual dossers’ Christmas party in Plymouth for many years and donated funds to Age Concern.

By the Nineties the artist had subordinated his art to another obsession: his library of some 60,000 books on philosophy, theology, anti-semitism, fascism and witchcraft. “He didn’t look for approval in anything other than the library that he built from nothing,” says Anna Navas. “It wasn’t just a solid academic collection but a beautiful and rare antiquarian collection. He was hugely proud of it, and driven by it - he painted in order to feed his book-buying habit.”

One result of this insatiable habit was the unfortunate “girlie paintings” period of the Nineties - a faintly embarrassing series of portraits of young women, more or less deshabillées, that the painter knocked out for quick bucks. Lenkiewicz was cashing in on “Lenkiewicz”. And, at about the same time, the cultural institutions of Plymouth began to make a little capital from him. There was “an audience” with Lenkiewicz at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in 1996, and a successful retrospective the following year at the City Museum. Lenkiewicz’s reputation was changing. The outsider artist had become a mascot for the city as familiar as the Mayflower Steps or a drunk squaddie on Union Street.

And then, in 2002, Robert Lenkiewicz died, as the result of a heart condition. His death was unexpected - he had recently embarked on what he envisaged to be his biggest Project, on addictive behaviour. Hundreds attended his memorial service at Plymouth’s Guildhall, and his remains are now buried in the back garden of his house in Lower Compton, a quiet suburb of Plymouth.

Three years on, Lenkiewicz’s legacy is still being debated - was he one of the foremost English social painters of the 20th century? Plymouth’s greatest artist since Joshua Reynolds? Or a charlatan with little more than a dab hand and an eye for the ladies? Unfortunately, for those of us who want to put a case for the former, most of the evidence is going under the gavel because Lenkiewicz was, it turns out, in enormous debt when he died.

Initially, his estate was valued at over £6m. The above Lenkiewicz Foundation began to discuss options with Plymouth City Council. There was talk of a permanent collection of a substantial number of his paintings and access to Lenkiewicz’s remarkable library in a dedicated building on the Barbican, funded partially by a Lottery grant. Then the initially high valuation of Lenkiewicz’s library was revised downwards, drastically – Lenkiewicz had overpaid for many of his treasured books - and the claims on the estate began to roll in, 150 in all, totalling between £2m and £3m.

The claims are varied: from those for the provision of three of Lenkiewicz’s children to many much smaller claims in which, typically a painting was promised informally in return for work done. According to Peter Walmsley, the executor of Lenkiewicz’s will and a partner at the firm of solicitors dealing with the claims, the administration of the estate is “enormously complex ... if the Queen had died it would have been simpler to organise.”

It is still uncertain as to whether the estate will still be solvent once all the claims have been settled and the legal fees paid: Three auctions - of about 600 paintings and drawings and the better books - have raised around £2m. Another “major sale of paintings” is probable, either this year or next. Not even a collection of about 150 of Lenkiewicz’s most important works, currently earmarked for the Lenkiewicz Foundation, is safe. Will there be anything left in the will to bequeath the Foundation once the creditors have been paid? Quite possibly not, in which case any future exhibition would have to rely entirely on loans.

Annie Hill-Smith, the chair of The Lenkiewicz Foundation, remains optimistic, nevertheless: “It doesn’t matter if we aren’t left a physical legacy. We can build up a catalogue of [Lenkiewicz’s] paintings. We can build up information about the paintings, the library and Robert himself.”

If you walk around Plymouth Barbican today Lenkiewicz’s marks are there, but already they’re fading. Next to his studio is his 3,000sq ft mural originally painted in 1971, a multitude of peeling faces representing the influence of Cabbalistic thought on Elizabethan philosophy. Around the corner is another mural, of heaving naked figures on the Day of Judgement. Joe Prete’s cafe still has Lenkiewicz’s local take on the Last Supper on its rear wall. Plymouth City Museum has a couple of paintings, and the Library a meagre selection of newspaper cuttings and a few of the Project booklets. Will the money be found to establish a permanent, appropriate monument to his work? Let’s hope so.

Until then, the people of Plymouth keep to themselves the story of their affair with Robert Lenkiewicz.

People Weekly article from 1989

When Robert Lenkiewicz paints the town in Plymouth, England, some people see only red.

Roger Wolmuth, People Weekly, v31, n3, p108(4) Jan 23, 1989

Reprinted from PEOPLE Magazine by special permission: (c) 1989 Time Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.people.com.

Eighty-eight writhing nudes weren't exactly what the good people of Plymouth, England, expected. At least not on the side of a four-story building, parading their parts for tots and tourists down at the local shopping arcade. Fact is, folks in Plymouth have never known what to expect from painter Robert Lenkiewicz, the world-class philanderer, egotist and all-around renegade who arrived in their midst in the '60s.

You see the problem. What Lenkiewicz does exhibit are paintings, often building-size murals, loosely modeled on the style of the Renaissance masters. Very loosely. Like his Descent to Hell, brushed onto the side of that shopping arcade, or The Devonport Ascension, featuring 140 Plymothians swirling through the sky in baby prams, lawn chairs and bicycles. Even his masterwork, Barbican Mural, is equal parts Old World and weird; it includes 40 local vagrants dressed as Elizabethan scholars with Lenkiewicz himself as their centerpiece, posing with his hand on a skull.

Art, however, is only one of Lenkiewicz's pursuits. Skirts are the other. Married three times and divorced twice, he admits to siring at least 15 children with a variety of bedmates. The latest arrival is 9-month-old daughter Thais, named after the title character in the Jules Massenet opera. Busy with birthing matters and the labor of girlfriend Karen Ciambriello, Lenkiewicz also happened to have a film crew handy to record the historic moment.

Baby Thais may appreciate that film of her parents one day, because Daddy may not be around too long. Staying with one woman "is no more realistic than having one meal, one decor, one set of clothes," says Lenkiewicz (who, in fact, does seem to wear only one set of clothes). "I do look forward to the day when the court of human rights regards it as an imprisonable offense for one human being to live with another for more than a fortnight." As for hard feelings on the part of spurned lovers, "A long time ago when I was less professional, there was a lot of skin-and-hair pulling on the stairs, a couple of suicides," he says. "'Ah, well, they'd top themselves over anything anyway. Hysterical personalities."

Reviews of the artist, like those of his work, are understandably mixed. Angry feminists have pelted him with insults on the street (an "unpleasant feeling," he admits), and at least one city councillor has denounced him as depraved. "Conceited? You must be joking. He's unbelievably vain," says Jill Russell, a local hotelier who once posed for the painter. "He's certainly a character, and the world needs characters," allows Gordon Draper, Plymouth's Lord Mayor. "He wants a good wash, though."

He seems to want for little else, thanks to patrons such as the Earl of St. Germans, a wealthy Cornish peer (who once described his recreation in the British Who's Who as "mucking about"). Lenkiewicz is also an accomplished barterer who never charges for his paintings when he can swap them for his day-to-day needs. At Prete's Cafe and Ice Cream Parlor, where he sometimes snacks, hangs his wall-size send-up of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. It features the cafe's owner as Judas Iscariot and the artist as Jesus Christ holding a Mars bar. Barnacle Bill's, his favorite bistro, gets mention in his exhibition brochures in exchange, says Lenkiewicz, for "free food-a bowl of soup, some salad. Perfectly adequate for myself and whatever guests I have."

Those guests come, on other occasions, to a cavernous, four-story warehouse that Lenkiewicz uses as studio, gallery and living quarters. On the ground floor are a photo-cluttered rolltop desk and a three-room library containing a portion of his 70,000 books. In a "death and suicide" corner are some postcards of mummies and a book displaying the Yiddish proverb, Dying while young is a boon in old age. In a nearby bookcase, a shelf of human skulls sits above 25 large, bound volumes of the artist's Aesthetic Notes, handwritten reflections on topics such as "vagrancy" "education," "orgasm" and "sexual behavior." The latter includes chronicles of his sexual dalliances complete with sketches, performance evaluations and an attendance graph chronicling his lovers' visits. "People have given up trying to count his offspring and his women," says Alfred Palmer, the Lord Mayor's secretary. "A golfing friend of mine went to look at one of his exhibitions, and the first painting he saw was one of his own daughter, in the nude. 'That looks like my Cathy!' he said. Lenkiewicz just looked at the picture and said dreamily, 'Ahhh, sweet.' "

For all his excesses, Lenkiewicz's ways aren't totally worldly. He doesn't drive (dismissing cars as "four­wheeled penises"), shuns alcohol ("a violence-making, paranoid-inducing drug") and avoids parties ("any crowd experience leads to trouble"). Some of that temperateness is understandable, perhaps, since Lenkiewicz's Russian father once trained to be a rabbi. His mother, he says, was the baroness daughter of Bernard von Schlossberg, the court painter to Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. (Predictably, Lenkiewicz doesn't fret over historical improbabilities; the good mad king died 103 years ago.)

At any rate, Mom and Dad fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled in London, where Lenkiewicz was born three years later. The family's home in a rundown hotel "was a lunatic asylum, really," says Lenkiewicz. There was "randy 92 ­year-old Mrs. Maxwell coming to the door stark naked, hair down to the ground, saying, 'Oh, it was beautiful once. Do you want sixpence? Why don't you come with me to my room.' My two brothers regarded it as a heinous background for young people, but all children should be witness to old age, human suffering, death, the transigence of things, human misery."

Inspired, he claims, by Charles Laughton's title performance in the movie Rembrandt, Lenkiewicz took up painting seriously when he was 9. Before long he was acting less like Laughton than like Gulley Jimson, the rascally artist-hero of Joyce Cary's novel The Horse's Mouth. While still in his teens and attending the well-­known St. Martin's School of Arts, he was already living with a woman twice his age and had fathered his first child. After a two-year stint at the Royal Academy of Arts (he was eventually expelled for chronic lateness), he set up shop in a large Hampstead studio and filled it with homeless street people whom he used as his models. The police considered his 70-plus vagrant guests a bit unsavory for the neighborhood, and one night while standing atop a ladder painting a sign, he suddenly felt the ladder lifting. "I was 35 feet in the air, and four policemen were at the bottom saying, 'We heard you were leaving.' You're not inclined to argue. I had seven days to get out of town."

After six years of teaching painting to students in London and Cornwall, he moved to Plymouth in 1969 and began again this time filling nine more warehouses with down-and-out derelicts whom he painted endlessly. They were "extraordinary people," he says. "I would have to check them every night. You'd find people beaten up. You'd carry people dead, their eyes eaten out by rats, drowned in their own vomit, through the rain. It concentrated the mind."

The project collapsed when Lenkiewicz, struggling for finances to keep the show afloat, was sentenced to jail for stealing lead, copper and rare books. Emerging two months later, he resumed his painting alone, parodying the powerful, elevating the poor and bearing witness "to what it means for alcoholics to be alcoholics, for heroin addicts to be heroin addicts, for lovers to be lovers."

Not everyone enjoyed the results. A mural of Plymouth's leading educators showed a soulless-looking mob dancing in a conga line to nowhere. His exhibitions, which have been raided by the police, have included a canvas of two of his sons engaged in a masturbation race, a picture of lovers eating each other's hearts out, and a study purporting to show pedophilia at a local men's club. Claiming the run-down dockside of town as his turf­ and working for free, as always-he began painting larger public works: a mural of Plymouth's postwar rebuilding for the guildhall, another for the medical center. "He's uplifted the amenity of the area," says mayoral secretary Palmer, "despite the Diogenes affair, which certainly caused our environmental health people some qualms at the time."

Diogenes, a vagrant whose actual name was Edwin McKenzie, worked 16 years for Lenkiewicz as a studio caretaker and became one of his favorite subjects. Before Diogenes died, says Lenkiewicz, the two made a pact that his body would be kept in the studio and safe from burial. "His was a serious embalming done by a world authority, the Royal College of Surgeons ," says Lenkiewicz, who made no secret of the scheme. Unimpressed, health officials rushed to the painter's studio to confiscate the coffin, only to find a grinning Lenkiewicz lying inside, hugging a hot-water bottle and holding a sign that said HABEAS CORPUS. "The health authorities, though absolutely enraged and apoplectic, were the first to concede that it wasn't a health problem," says Lenkiewicz. "No one can own a body once the tenant has vacated the premises." As for the corpse's whereabouts today, Lenkiewicz insists that "Diogenes is sound and well," but will say no more.

Lenkiewicz, too, has no plans for leaving. Among his future projects, he says, is a ceiling-walls-and-floor mural in his "Family" series, showing 200 people eating their children in a "huge cannibalistic rite of autophagy [self-devouring]." Last fall the scaffolding went up for his latest work-in-progress, to be painted over his now 18-year-old Barbican Mural. Titled The Dance of Death, it will portray 30 of Plymouth's civic leaders and 400 of its residents in what the artist calls "a medieval memento mori." Fears that he'll portray Plymouth's elders in the buff have drawn a quick snort from Lenkiewicz ("as if I wanted to paint naked city councillors. . ."), but the townsfolk had better not relax. "If they really knew what it was going to be," says Lenkiewicz happily, "they would feel even more agitated and worried."

CAPTION: "I prefer the cold and damp when working outdoors," says Lenkiewicz, but his hands-on style in the studio with model Benedikte Esbenson, right, is all warmth.

CAPTION: See above.

CAPTION: Robert "is totally honest with everyone about everything," says Karen Ciambriello, who bore his latest child, Thais.

CAPTION: Once jailed for stealing rare books, Lenkiewicz now hopes to turn his huge private collection into a public library.

CAPTION: "One can make one's life interesting without being too much of a public nuisance," says Lenkiewicz, in his studio with The Deposition, but he hasn't proved it to everyone.

CAPTIONS: Robert Lenkiewicz. (portrait)

R.O. Lenkiewicz: Chapter 1. Early Years

What was your first interest in painting?

As I recollect, nine penguins on a plank in a swimming pool was my first illustration and it went on from there. I was also very fond of The Three Musketeers and Robin Hood.

Was painting in your blood—did you have a history of artists in your family?

My mother claimed her father was the court painter to King Ludwig of Bavaria, a man called Bernard von Schlossberg. He painted those decorative Wagnerian fantasies on the ceilings of the castles. So, in the blood? I don’t know. Art and genetics; there’s a whole library on that.

Your background was one of European Jewish émigrés—what influence do you think that has had upon you and your work?

In my opinion, probably profound. At the age of sixteen I would have said none, at twenty-five I would have said occasionally, and the older I get the more embedded I find I am in real Yiddisher schmaltz of one kind or another; particularly schmilosophy as opposed to philosophy. A very strong influence, no doubt.

What was the first subject matter of your paintings?

It was the old people. My parents had a Jewish hotel that was really a lunatic asylum. It was called the Hotel Shemtov, the Hotel ‘Good-name’. It had sixty rooms and there they were: Mrs Jacobus, Mrs Frankl, Mrs Webber, Mrs Maxwell, Dickie Valentine’s grandmother, Mr Meyers, Mrs Levi and so it went on. All of them were elderly, all of them half-crazed; many of them were survivors from Auschwitz, Treblinka and Buchenwald with stories to tell.

It was the most extraordinary place. I was introduced to mental illness, human suffering and death at a very early age and thought it salutary and thought provoking. My first sitters were those people; they all posed for me on huge canvases from the age of eleven onwards. I worked in Room 3, which had green lino, prolifically and totally obsessively. When I look back on it now, I was as crazed as the rest of them.

What did they make of your paintings?

They were certainly curious about all these portraits. They would never have been painted in their lives; they were all from Russia, Lithuania, Poland—a completely different kind of thing. ‘Thou shalt make no graven image’ was absolutely inherent in their culture. I remember even having an exhibition in my room that my brother Johnnie helped with. We charged a penny entrance fee.

How did your parents view your painting?

My mother encouraged my painting tremendously. However, she thought it very odd that I would work right through the night or sit out on the flat roof with a hot water bottle and pillow and stare at the stars or even go to sleep there. I was also in the habit of dissecting pigeons pinned to the wardrobe door and making anatomical drawings. Indeed, that’s why my twin brother left the room we had always shared. I left a pigeon’s head on the bed, accidentally in my view, and he lay on it; he fled in horror and never came back. That was good—now I had the room to myself.

What sort of man was your father?

He was a tiny little man, just five feet tall, who came to Britain from Poland as a refugee in 1939. I can make no sense of his life or what his character was, even to this day.

I remember one little incident. I was very keen on horses; I’d get up early in the morning and shin down the drainpipe outside my window before school because I knew that the stables opened at five o’clock in the morning. I’d go to nearby Brondesbury Park with my sketchbooks and I would draw all these horses. I have nostalgic memories of that; early winter mornings, the horses’ shadows cast on the cobbles, the smells, the atmosphere, the old men pulling the horses out of their stalls. They were rag and bone men and they would spread out all over the city and then come back late in the evening to clean, feed and stable the horses. There must have been some thirty horses there.

One night I was in my bedroom drawing a horse from a photograph when I heard my father’s footsteps outside the door. I don’t really know why, but I hid the photograph under the drawing board and continued to do the drawing as though I hadn’t copied it from a photograph. My father entered the room and sat down on the bed next to me and said, “Sehr gut, sehr gut! But something wrong with the fetlock.” He himself had been a breaker of horses, inheriting his father’s business in Poland, and he had a cleft in his jaw where he’d ridden into a tree.

As he pulled the drawing board forward to get a closer look, a section of the hidden photograph peeped out. He continued talking about the fetlock and without making any comment he casually pushed the board back over the photograph. He never said a word about it. That’s my only communication I recollect with him, ever.

Do you think your passion for horses must have been learned at your father’s knee? It seems too much of a coincidence that he was a horse breaker himself.

It seems logical, but I cannot recollect any sort of relationship with him. But I certainly was mad on horses. I was fascinated by Stubbs’ anatomical studies of horses from a very early age.

One of the most intense experiences of my life occurred at those stables in Kilburn and it’s the only one I’ve ever had that could be described as a ‘mystical experience’. The sun was just rising and they brought a large chestnut-brown horse into the cobbled courtyard. The horse was above my eye level as I crouched down to draw it, half-silhouetted against the rising sun. Suddenly, it spasmed; its two front legs stretched forwards and its hind legs backwards. It looked like a great charger with its head arched. I wondered what on earth had happened. It was absolutely rigid with muscular tension.

Suddenly, this great dark shaft appeared silhouetted low down against the sun. It was the horse’s penis, huge and terrifying. The horse urinated violently on the ground; all it was doing was peeing. However, I was transfixed as all the urine splashed up off the cobblestones, glistening with gold and fire in the sun around the spasming horse. I couldn’t hear anything or see anything other than this fountain of light. It was a moment when everything seemed to merge into a single event—an intense physiological connection of things. Then it stopped urinating and it was almost as though the whole horse began to soften and collapse.

When did your mother escape from Germany?

I think in 1939. She met my father about a year later in Golders Green; a marriage of convenience. I think the British authorities were allowing Jews into this country provided they were under thirty-nine years of age and my parents just qualified.

She had spent some time in a concentration camp, I understand.

I’m not so sure; I think not. She claimed that she had escaped with her sister on a boat; that her other sister had been in a camp; that another sister, with hair growing down to the ground, had her hair set alight by Hitler Youth; that she herself had been nearly raped in the Black Forest near Frankfurt. However, I doubt she had any personal experience of a camp.

I remember the cook, a Mrs Bobik from Czechoslovakia, being harangued by my mother many times with “You don’t know how much I have suffered! You don’t know what I’ve been through!” Then one day I was alone in the kitchen with Mrs Bobik and as I went to reach for the porridge, she slapped me gently on the hand and said “I get it!” As she did so, her sleeve rode up and there was the Belsen number tattooed on her forearm. I said, “You were there! You were there!” But she hushed me up. I asked, “Why don’t you tell her that you were there?” —because my mother hadn’t even been in the camps. But she said, “I can be silent because I was there.” She forbade me ever to mention it to my mother.

However, my mother certainly suffered the consequences of being uprooted and dispossessed, of coming to England and not being able to speak the language. Also, in the phrase that I often use, which she coined, “There’s no anti-Semite like a Jewish anti-Semite.” She had to work for Jewish people scrubbing floors and she was worked very hard. I think she felt she had never been fully appreciated for qualities she felt she had. She was a baroness in Germany; she thought she was insightful and kind and wise, and several people who knew her did too.

How do you see your relationship with your mother?

I think it was really a rather sad affair. I think she was genuinely attached to me. She used to inform me that I was very handsome, a “good looking chap.” She made quite a fuss about it, but really I think it was a kind of inverted anti-Semitism because I was the only blond son; my two brothers were swarthy and dark. I don’t really know, but I think there was a slight ‘blond beast’ element there.

You say you were her favourite—was there a strong attachment on both sides?

My two brothers would certainly agree that I was favoured. She certainly was attached to me, but I was fairly distant.

Would you say it was a romantic attachment on her part?

Yes. Yes, quite definitely. There are other things I could say about that relationship but it just wouldn’t be fair.

Did you draw or paint her very much?

Rather a lot. I suppose the turning point in my relationship with her was when I was about thirteen. I’d painted her and thought, “My goodness, this is rather good!” I took the painting upstairs and put it on my easel by the bed. I thought I would go downstairs and get a hot water bottle and some cocoa for bed, not look at the painting, and then sit myself up comfortably in bed and finally look at the portrait and see what I thought of it. An hour later, would I think it was as good as I first thought? I believed it a significant turning-point picture.

I did all that; got into bed, puffed up the pillows and prepared to look at it. Then this horrible sinking sensation—the whole portrait had been completely swirled and smudged and scraped in the most violent way. I knew instantly that while I had been down in the kitchen my mother had sneaked up and destroyed the image because she didn’t like the way she looked in it.

I tore down the stairs to her room and said, “Why did you do that?”

She said, “Noh! It was a terrible picture, a terrible picture.”

I said, “You don’t know what you’ve done. That was a stupid thing to do. I can’t tell you how angry I am.” That would have been the turning point. I tended to freeze off after that.

Were you a solitary child?

Very, very much so, but it never occurred to me for one moment that there was anything disagreeable about it—quite the contrary; it was heaven. What was anathema to me was to be told that I should go to the nice Jewish boys club down the road or that I should play with other kids in the street; I had absolutely no desire to do that.

Perhaps the single most significant event of my youth, apart from my one-way friendship with Leonardo da Vinci, was the unexpected arrival of a family at my parents’ hotel who were placed in the attic rooms. One of the daughters, Ria, haunted my mind intensely from the first glance at an aesthetically cunning level. She was nine, I about fourteen. Her presence stained my life a silver-gold colour as I moved between the two worlds of brutish schooling and the unhinged ravings of my parents’ environment.

We used to meet clandestinely on staircases or exchange glances across rooms. I painted her, drew her, talked with her. Even the most innocuous subject matter built bridges to heaven. It was my first and probably only ‘theological’ experience.

How long did she remain at the hotel?

Oh, just a couple of years, but to me that was traversed time. I smile when I look back on it now, but it really was the most extraordinary situation. Do you know that film ‘The Summer of ’42’? How adolescent events can be so poignant they haunt the mind forever? It was very much like that.

Did the friendship endure?

Certainly. One of the most important friendships of my life.

Were there books in the house?

A few Hebrew books in the office. The nearest thing to a library was my own, which was on the marble mantle shelf in my room. There were pencil inscriptions for the sections: ‘Horses’ for the books on horses, which I was mad on; ‘Philos’ for the one-and-a-half books—there was half a book missing—on philosophy; ‘Art’, several books there; and I think there was one book on anatomy.

Was it an intellectual household?

Well, many of the survivors from the camps clearly had experienced and suffered a lot in life and some of them were scholars.

My intellectual life began entirely circumstantially when I was twelve or thirteen. I was browsing through a rather battered Encyclopedia Britannica and I came across the name ‘Nee-etski’, or so I pronounced it. I asked my mother, “Who was Nee-etski?” She said, “Who?” I said, “Nee-etski.” My mother said to me, “Go and ask Mr Plotnik if you want to know who Nee-etski was.”

I went to Mr Plotnik and I said, “Who is Nee-etski?”

Mr Plotnik said, “Who?”

I said, “Nee-etski.”

He asked, “What was the first name?”

I said, “Fred, Frederick.”

“Ah!” he said, “You mean Nietzsche!” That was probably my first great aesthetic experience—the assimilation of this incomprehensible word ‘Nee-etski’ into Nietzsche.

My mother used to go on about Novalis, Hölderlin, Heine and the German Romantics; Goethe and Schiller in particular. You had this curious sense quite early on that great things had happened in Germany, that here was one of the most phenomenal intellectual cultures ever known and yet look what it had led to.

Were there any adults around giving you special encouragement or acting as role models?

Not until I was sixteen, seventeen. Then I met a Hungarian philosopher called Alfred Rheinhold, known as Alfred Reynolds, who had a very fine library. He formed a society called ‘The Bridge’—he was friendly with Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber. I used to design the covers for the society’s quarterly magazine. I remember doing pen and ink drawings of Nietzsche, Socrates, Goethe, Buber and Schweitzer, many others.

So when did you first absorb the philosophy of Nietzsche?

Mostly when I was seventeen or eighteen, particularly ‘The Portable Nietzsche’—I’ve still got the very copy upstairs.

Did the concept of the übermensch (the Superman) appeal to you?

(Laughing). In later days when I was at St. Martin’s, yes, it did, quite strongly. I had a very powerful, immature sense of destiny; no doubt about it.

Were you troubled by the alleged anti-Semitism of Nietzsche’s philosophy?

At the time I would have been unaware of it. Certainly, I was told, “Oh, that Jew-hater!” and so on. I couldn’t see it. I looked for signs of it and yes, I saw a criticism of Jewish culture insofar as Nietzsche felt that the Jews had moved away from the Old Testament towards the New, whose sentiments he despised. However, I couldn’t see how that related to anti-Semitism; certainly not the anti-Semitism that his sister and brother-in-law encouraged in their occasional meetings with Hitler and throughout the whole South American nonsense.

I didn’t know such things as anti-Semitism existed because I went to school at the Menorah Primary School, a gentle, harmless little school where I was made Hero for a Day when I saved the beautiful Gloria Tessler from a bee by swatting it.

Was this basically an émigré school?

There would have been a lot of that, yes. It was in Golders Green and it was so gentle, so innocuous. However, my brother and I had to leave and so we entered the real world—Beckford Primary School. That’s where I encountered Harvey, the first uninitiated anti-Semite I came across. “You fucking Yid!” We were little second formers and he was a huge older boy. It wasn’t uncommon to have your head pushed into the toilet and the chain pulled simply because one was Jewish.

How did you fare academically?

I don’t really know. I remember almost none of it; no maths lessons, no English lessons. I just remember painting and drawing, painting and drawing. Anyway, I later went to the Harben Secondary Modern and there I must have taken some exam or other because I ended up at the Christopher Wren Technical School in Notting Hill Gate. That was almost entirely arts oriented; I would imagine that some two thirds of the curriculum was visual arts of one kind or another.

Which painters did you admire in your teens?

There were all sorts, but always the holy trinity—Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael—as well as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Poussin and so on. Hardly any modern painters; I didn’t even know they existed!

What sort of popular culture did you absorb—did you go to the movies as a youngster?

One wouldn’t be allowed to. I remember sneaking off to see ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ and recall being quite struck by that as a theme. I also remember a film called ‘Rock Around the Clock’ with Bill Haley; I don’t know how because normally I wouldn’t be interested in that at all. When he sang the title song everyone in the cinema got up to dance; you could feel the building shaking. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I felt very anachronistic, as if I’d be caught. I was the only person sitting. They had these weird hairstyles and purple jackets and were dancing very skillfully to this complete rubbish on the screen. I had absolutely no sympathy for popular music

What events were inspiring you to paint at this stage?

Oh, anything at all. I would have ideas while I was at school and then try them out when I got home to the hotel. I thought, “I’ll paint the irises at the bottom of the garden by candlelight.” I took twenty or thirty candles from the store and then painted only the shadows that they made. I was interested to see whether they would look anything like irises. I would have seen the yellow tobacco stain colour of a late night slash of light on the red letter box near the hotel and go out and paint that.

I painted a huge canvas of The Passover. As a child one was supposed to sit there and watch the wine and when it began to shake and shimmer that was supposed to be the prophet Elijah flying over. Once I was asked to go out and find a shnorrer, a beggar, so I did; I found this dosser with a rough beard. There was horror and consternation; this “smelly creature” was asked to get out. My father went and fetched the neighbour instead. Of course, that’s what you were supposed to do—find a symbolic beggar.

Were you not aware of the ritual aspects of that?

Not at all. I was shocked at the time—I took it literally. I was so embarrassed that I took a shilling out of my mother’s purse and ran down the road after this beggar to give it to him. He was actually weeping. I later became familiar with enough down and outs to know that was unusual. It makes me think he was a tramp or a gypsy rather than an alcoholic dosser. I gave him the shilling and he patted me on the head. He was smelly!

Was that your first ‘Robin Hood’ experience of taking from the rich to give to the poor?

Yes, one of them. I did it a lot after that. Ruthlessly.

Does your work have its roots in your early experiences at the Hotel? Many of the Projects focus on the dispossessed and people who have known suffering in one way or another. Do you think you were taking up the task of bearing witness and of bringing into the light something which was hidden?

It’s possible, but that’s getting a little bit psychiatric about it. However, I am sympathetic to the notion of a missed opportunity with all those people in the Hotel, pouring in and out for years.

Were you aware of the cataclysm that had befallen them?

I think probably not.

The mortality rate must have been very high—were you aware of deaths happening around you?

I had to clean the bodies, to tidy things up. My mother was too squeamish to do it. My strongest recollection is of this woman who hemorrhaged all over the place when I was about thirteen or fourteen. She had grabbed hold of my hand with such intensity that her nails had sunk into the palm of my hand. Then there was this strange noise and she started to shudder. Crimson-black blood, very thick, came out of her eyes, her ears, her nose and her mouth—all over me, all over my face. It was a very large room, thirty feet long, but there were chunks of this thick blood on the far wall. She was juddering, drowning in her own blood, and I was stroking her hair waiting for her to die. That was one of many incidents with people dying.

What were your feelings as that happened?

I don’t think I had any feelings. I remember thinking “this is real”—I think I felt privileged and interested, but I don’t think I was aware of thinking “this is a privilege”.

Did you draw any philosophical conclusions from such events?

I became very aware of loneliness and that life was a tragedy. I remember one of the guests knocking on my door at three o’clock in the morning; she saw the light was on because I was painting. It was a huge painting of stablemen done from memory and from drawings I had made. I opened the door and there she was, tiny and skeletal and completely naked. She had white hair that almost touched the ground.

She looked at me and whispered, “Would you like to come to my room?”

I said, “I think you should go back to your room—you’re going to catch cold.”

“Why don’t you come with me? Come with me, my little boy.”

I told her I would take her to her room. She stopped still and said, “I was beautiful once—look!” She flung her hair forward—I can still remember the sensation of all this white hair coming down—and it was all red back there! She was a redhead, just a little of the colour remained, but she was so lined and ugly. Then she said to me, “Dreck! You woolly-haired little bastard, may you die like flies in the hot summer time, you would have cut your throat for me once!”

Then, “Do you want sixpence?” And she put sixpence in my hand and then wandered off back to her own room. I was about thirteen.

Were you often pursued sexually at the Hotel?

I don’t think she was pursuing me—she was just a bit crazy. I can remember one guest at the hotel… some things occurred which are not for this book! I did have affairs with some of the maids. There was one maid in particular with whom I’d ‘lie down’ on the landing outside Mrs Kempner’s room. She was stone deaf, so we could do it outside her front door and not worry!

What was your mother’s attitude to sex?

My mother knew that I was in love with the maids. I remember going down to the cold store room one hot summer evening when I was eleven to get a cool drink of fruit juice. Mary, the Irish maid, was cleaning the floor on her hands and knees and as I watched her I could see down the top of her jumper. She noticed me and smiled and said something like “Do you like what you see?” She came over to me and took my hand in hers and then placed it inside her jumper against her breast. I moved my hand—that wasn’t the only bit of me that was moving. Suddenly, I heard my mother’s voice. She was standing in the doorway and said, “Noh! NOH! Is that a nice thing to do?” And then she turned away and left. It was such a pleasurable and innocent thing to do that I was saddened by that reaction. I remember asking her once, “Where the hell do you think your three six-foot sons came from?” She said, “I don’t remember! I’m not suggesting you were all immaculate conceptions, but I would not be at all surprised.” I had quite a close conversation with my mother shortly before she died and she did admit to me that she’d never experienced orgasm.

At sixteen you enrolled at St. Martin’s College of Art and Design. Did you ever consider anything apart from going to art college and painting?

The only two things I ever considered were painting and philosophy. I’ve still got some of my early notes where I was relating them in a rather daft way. I was also interested in medicine; I had a fantasy at one point to become a doctor and even applied to the college—until I was told it was a seven year course! I really did think that I would join Albert Schweitzer at Lambaréné.

When did you discover Schweitzer’s legend?

Quite early on, because the small popular paperbacks about Lambaréné used to lie around the hotel. I was very interested in relating ethics to aesthetics, even at that time. I remember using this phrase all the time “The only difference is the difference; the only difference is the difference” to avoid making value judgements, but that difference was aesthetic.

I have always thought it very odd that writers, musicians or painters could deal sensitively with humanity and the tragic sense of life whilst at the same time living a lifestyle that profoundly contradicted that. So you have Rembrandt, Wagner, Renoir, Degas, Chopin—they’re all either anti-Semites or pro-slavery or violent or disagreeable in all sorts of different ways; yet their creative work can be about the highest ‘spiritual’ ideals. The notion of people dealing with inhumanity not finding it necessary to live that but being content only to write about it or paint about it was very discomfiting for me in my late teens.

Did going to St. Martin’s open up a different view of life to you?

When I was at St. Martin’s I felt as alienated as I did anywhere else; nothing changed. I wasn’t interested in particular friendships; I was quite comfortable with my own company. I think I was considered odd.

Did you get formal instruction there?

There would have been conventional attention to drawing, which I was probably fairly average at. I worked on a huge scale on very large canvases. I do remember Frederick Gore, the Principal, and some of the other teachers: Ruskin Spear, Peter Blake, Elizabeth Frink, to name just a few.

All I recall is that I worked very much harder than anyone else; it didn’t seem to be an effort for me. The other students were going every night to pubs and clubs; they’d invite me, but I had absolutely no interest. I couldn’t wait to get home to my studios.

Eventually, I found that they started coming to my studios. Since I was working consistently and fairly hard, studying and researching, I ended up attracting the lazy and the dilettantish, many of whom I painted.

Were you set on your own course and artistic style before you went there?

Being at St. Martin’s certainly initiated me into the knowledge that there were ways of painting and ways of experiencing the world that were nothing to do with simply reproducing it as a retinal experience.

There was this new development in art—that it was permissible to reproduce the retinal world provided you did it in your own way, not according to a traditional technique that simply effected a skillful presentation like, shall we say, Sargent. So it was permissible to represent the world provided there was a personal touch that still fitted in with the subjectivity of Expressionism, with the subjectivity of Cubism and of certain aspects of Surrealism. The thing these approaches had in common was this attention to the individual, the personal and the private—the sense that you somehow came first. However, I didn’t paint in that way.

This would have been the late fifties, early sixties when the London art world was dominated by New American Painting.

A lot of fuss was being made at the time over the so-called ‘kitchen sink’ gang, people like Bratby and a few others, which I couldn’t bear. I remember that the whole class had to go to see this Bratby exhibition. I went along and found it lively and energetic, but I wasn’t moved. I just wasn’t getting the same sensations as when I went to the National Gallery.

I was very attracted to the idea of technical skill in painting. I knew that there was danger in that and was frequently told so by others. I can remember Freddy Gore seeing my work and saying something like, “The trouble with your work, Lenkiewicz, is that one first thinks ‘Oh, my goodness; that’s really good! That’s really skillful, really well drawn,’ but then you look at it more closely and it all falls apart.” I once did a twenty-foot painting on a Nietzschean theme, a self-portrait, naked, with dozens of other people in it, and he said, “Very impressive at first, Lenkiewicz, and then just bloody vulgar!”

Did that hit home or did you just think him mistaken?

No, no, no; I listened. I wanted to learn and to understand, I wanted to grasp that type of sophistication that would teach me that technical skill was not what painting was about.

Were you aware of developments in contemporary painting in the fifties?

Yes. I made a special visit every single day to the library of St. Martin’s. I remember pulling out a book on Hans Hoffman and really making an effort; it was very difficult. I remember the work of Poliakoff and the early work of Michael Andrews in this country.

I lived in the Hampstead area. I would see people like the kinetic sculptor Kenneth Martin walking up and down the road and one felt very aware of, very sensitive to, the otherness of what was happening. You had the same feeling towards it as you might have to somebody who was preoccupied with mathematics or physics. You looked at it from a distance and wondered what was going on.

Did you admire their paintings?

It would have been truly difficult to do that. That wouldn’t have happened for a couple of years and then it would have been Rothko, Barnett Newman and Sam Francis. He was the first one where I began to feel that I was responding first of all to the energy and the scale and then to this notion of colourfield, of being swamped by something rather than your mental eye enveloping it. But so much was going on: Bacon, de Kooning, Pollock, and always one slid back into looking at figurative work… and then back again.

You didn’t sympathise with Patrick Heron’s view that the Americans had ‘abolished the image’ from pictures?

I don’t think I would have been intellectually aware of that notion until my very late teens. I wouldn’t have been thinking along those lines; I would have been in a quasi-mystified state and thinking there must be some sense in this, I wonder what it is? It was a riddle. You have to remember that I was drowning in this fantasy of Courbet in his studio surrounded by paintings.

Did you see abstract art as anti-humanist? Was it the ability of figurative painting to explore the human condition that appealed to you?

No, I couldn’t feel that because the names of the painters were the same names as the people at my mother’s hotel! The Hoffmans and the Rothkoviches and so on. No, there was something going on here—these were the Real McCoy, these were Jewish scholars, these were refugee mathematicians. There’s something going on here, what is it? But there was still this confusion about not being able to let go of the image and respond to the paint itself, to the calligraphy of the mark. One simply hadn’t developed that aesthetic cunning.

Was there no ongoing discussion about these issues at St. Martin’s or the Royal Academy?

I’m sure there was, but I don’t remember it. I recollect none of the students I was involved with discussing it much. I remember one incident during my early days at the RA when I saw a student painting a target on the ground. I said to him, “Ah, you’ve got an interest in Jasper Johns,” and he said, “Yeah.” So I said, “Could you explain to me what you are doing?” Anyway, it became quite clear within half a minute that he had no idea at all what it was about and somehow just found the image appealing. I asked him if he was aware that Jasper Johns had been influenced by Wittgenstein, something that may not be the case in terms of modern scholarship, but it was thought so at that time. He asked me who Wittgenstein was and that did it for me—there he was painting a target for no good reason whatsoever. I felt very uncomfortable with all that and it only made me more determined to find out what Jasper Johns actually was doing.

Did you ever do the rounds of the commercial galleries in London?

Only when I was at the Royal Academy when they were just around the corner. I was pretty astonished; it was a new world and I would go to them assiduously. But mainly, I would go to the ‘Nash’ and the Tate and, of course, places like the Wallace Collection. I became so informed on the National Gallery that I knew the position of every single painting upstairs and downstairs. I remember the day when it was all changed around and this vast amount of information in my head became instantly obsolete.

Did you copy paintings at the National Gallery?

I copied the Velázquez, the life-size Philip IV. I thought that a beautiful, cunning and skillful painting at the time and I did my thesis on it. I think I was seventeen and Velázquez became my first serious hero—Velázquez; the painter’s painter. Then it was Vermeer, then Poussin, and then it started to sneak up to Cézanne and finally a couple of contemporaries.

Were you going away from these encounters having been influenced by the subject matter or the marks of the paint itself?

No, it would have been the marks themselves. The way the paint was handled would haunt the mind, quite definitely.

Did you start to feel like an endangered species? Did you think abstract painting was going to inherit the earth?

No, because I was fairly satisfied very early on that there was no real distinction between figurative and abstract painting. I can remember arguing with the students and saying, “What’s the difference between saying ‘that’s your grandmother’ and ‘that’s a yellow square’? They’re both recognised. ‘That’s a blue squiggle, that’s Primrose Hill’; what’s the difference?” I don’t see that there can be a distinction.

Were you reading Greenberg?

Yes I was and I thought him a lovely old Jewish romantic. But sometimes, I began to feel that there were elements of aesthetic fascism in this new work, that since fascism had been operating in Europe in various guises through the thirties and forties why wouldn’t it appear in the visual arts? Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian were all absolutists. Rodchenko, the Bauhaus, some of the colour theorists—they all seemed to have this desire to fix and trap human emotion in relation to colour, shape and texture, to create rules and laws. There seemed to be an aesthetic fascism going on.

They were like the philosopher Heidegger—they wanted to have the last word?

I think so, I think so. There’s a story about Picasso that somebody mentioned to him that Giacometti was trying to define figure and space, and solve the problem. Picasso said, “There is no problem. You cannot solve it. That’s the point of it.” Or words to that effect. Of course, it’s a very attractive idea that you can somehow treat the aesthetic experience as a science—you will ask certain sorts of questions and if you ask the right ones you will finally discover the answer. I don’t think creativity is like that.

Do you think that the move toward abstraction, particularly for the refugee Jewish artists, amounted to a flight from dealing with the real world in art since the real world for them had been the thirties and forties with all their horrors?

It’s possible, but I wouldn’t want to be quite so ‘psychiatric’ about aesthetics. It seems to me that the kind of marks that Rembrandt, Titian or Franz Hals were making as they got old in their last years have something very much in common with the kind of marks that Picasso would be making in his last years—or Goya, or Michelangelo’s Rondanini. There’s just something about time breaking things up; form, concepts of space, definitions, beginnings and ends—old age tears them up, it’s all in tatters. You do get this feeling that every human life, certainly these long-term creative activities, lead to dissolution, breaking up, something eviscerated, a parting of the waves. I don’t think that this happens in culture alone, but in each human life. Looking at the last works of long-suffering thinking painters, and writers and poets, seems to me to show that tendency.

It’s not a defeatist thing. It’s almost as if after a lifetime trying to record “the white spaces in between”, which is what they felt their business was, there’s a final recognition that they cannot be recorded, of the limitations of art, and then of life as a tragedy. There is a deep humanity there, but by that I don’t mean that they should love their neighbour in a traditional sense; they were often swines. But there is a certain relentless recognition that they’re alone. It’s not self-pitying; they just recognise it as the problem of existence.

Would you say you have never lost your sense of wonder at the visual world?

I think so, but I feel very unsentimental about it. I can remember quite early on feeling an actual sense of ugliness when I caught myself being more preoccupied with the painting than with the event. I always feel uncomfortable with the notion of the painter being more interested in the canvas than the event in front of them. I know they may have to be and that they may believe that they are discovering new ways of saying old things, but I am uncomfortable with the fact that they can tear their eye away from the event and find the canvas more interesting.

What is it about the event that is of such interest—surely a painter is expected to be objective about this?

I coined the phrase, “Nothing haunts the mind more deeply than the plain fact of a thing” and by the fact of a thing I was just referring to that which was retinally experienced. Not how it existed and not why; simply that it is. Suddenly deciding to paint it or about it is in some sense to move yourself away from it.

Do you feel moved by such things?

I would certainly feel more moved by the event than I would by most works of art. I’m rarely moved by works of art. Cathedrals can achieve it; they, of course, envelop the very space that you are looking at. But to distract yourself, to convert the event into this series of marks and to make a big fuss over it, makes me uncomfortable sometimes.

Were you particularly sensitive to the ephemeral nature of events?

Yes, very much so. I was very aware of the passing of things, of decay.

When did you begin to think about organising your paintings in particular themes or projects?

Quite early on—about twenty-two years old. The first themes, almost all of them lost, were of a Rabbinical nature, quite schmaltzy. They were of old Hasidim dancing in the sky surrounded by flames. I was very taken by Hasidic legends that if they danced in a particular way a blue ring of fire would form around them. I was very taken with the image of people floating in space. I liked the idea of an individual floating in space like a planet.

Were you still living at the hotel?

No, I left home when I was at St. Martin’s, upsetting my mother very, very much in the process.

I was about sixteen or seventeen and we had some sort of row. She said, “You would not last five minutes in the real world! What do you know about the real world?” I told her I could walk out the front door, just turn right or left and I’d get on just fine. “You think so? Then do it, do it!” she shouted. So I did, then and there.

And didn’t come back?

I didn’t come back for nine months. I had nowhere to stay. I walked all the way to Soho and slept on a doorstep. I left without any desire to inflict distress—I was just determined to be independent—but I know that it upset her deeply. Obviously, as you get older you realise just how much.

Where were your studios?

It would have been Fellows Road, Adelaide Road, Eton Avenue, Primrose Hill, Regents Park Road, all that area. Probably thirty different studios over that period of time, some of them huge, derelict, some smaller. I was constantly being thrown out for missing the rent.

If someone had walked into one of your studios at that time what sort of sight would have greeted them?

They would have seen huge canvases all around the walls. Many people did visit; they were bad paintings, but they were very impressive to look at. There would have been fifty or so people dossing in the studio, most of them crazy, disturbed people.

Was it while you were at St. Martin’s that you began to paint the portraits of down and outs?

No, it would have been a little bit later at the Royal Academy. They wouldn’t have known, of course. The work they saw was fairly straightforward figurative painting done in a rather traditional way. I was expelled from the RA and I can’t remember why. I have asked my friend Aury, who was at the RCA, and he said it was through poor attendance. I find that surprising because I really liked it there, particularly the library. But I had my own set-up, of course.

Were you reconciled with your mother by the time you went to the Royal Academy?

Oh yes, I’d call round. Usually, I’d scrounge some food and sit down and listen to her problems. I was glad to get out and breathe the fresh air and go straight to my studio or the bed of any lady I was with. No, it was sad with my mother.

Did your mother think that you had failed to live up to her expectations?

I think so. She was very, very fond of me, but her last words to me were “I know you have many troubles, I know you have many difficulties and that life is very hard. But frankly, I don’t give a damn!” To which I replied, “Well ma, you’re not in a very cheerful mood—let me paint you.” She said, “Over my dead body you’ll paint me!” To which I replied, “OK.” Those were my last words to her.

Anyway, she died. I went to the hospital and they had lost the body. They were apologetic and took some time to find it. I went into the room and she was there on a trolley covered with this zipped plastic bag. I pulled down the zip and there she was with a bandage around her head and jaw, her two big toes fastened together with a piece of cord. I did drawings of it and that’s the painting shown in the frontispiece of this book.

© 1997 White Lane Press
www.whitelanepress.co.uk

R.O. Lenkiewicz: Chapter 2. Vagrancy

In the sixties you began painting London’s, and later Plymouth’s, down and outs and eventually collected the paintings into the Vagrancy Project, an exhibition of hundreds of paintings and a large volume of research notes. Can you tell me how it originated?

While in Hampstead, Camden Town and Chalk Farm, I had all kinds of studios. A lot of disturbed and difficult people were attracted to those studios. They knew they could get somewhere to stay, something to eat, and I would paint them.

What sort of characters were they?

A lot of them were criminals or mentally ill. There was a character called Lofty, a huge man. I once saw him remove with his bare hands the door of a police car when they tried to take him from my studio—it took seven policemen to finally get him in the car.

One day a friend of mine came running to my studio and said, “Quick, quick, it’s Lofty! Something awful’s happening. He won’t listen to anyone, he’ll only listen to you.” We ran round the corner to a nearby bistro and all these chairs were being hurled down the stairs—no one could get up. Lofty was shouting, “Even you, Robert, even you! I’ll fuckin’ kill ya!” I got up past the chairs and saw that he had this poor woman splayed out on the ground, her clothes torn away. There was blood everywhere—the woman was catatonic. It was just the only time he’d ever tried sex because he’d been in prison for years. It turned out that the woman was the companion of the friend who had come to fetch me.

He was threatening to kill me. I walked over and said, “Lofty, you simply cannot do this.” I picked the girl up and brought her downstairs. Lofty was fuming but didn’t attack me. I went back to my studio and later heard these heavy footfalls on the stairs. The door swung open and there was Lofty, all six-foot eight of him. He came over and seized me in a bear hug. He had an extremely rough beard, short stubble, and he rubbed his face against mine hard enough to draw blood—it was like gravel. He said, “I’ll kill ya, I’ll kill ya! But I can’t kill ya because I fuckin’ luv ya,” and he put me down and there was an end to the matter. He had managed to control this terrible rage inside him. He eventually died in Piccadilly after becoming a heroin addict.

Were you becoming interested in these people as character studies or were they just available as sitters?

It was a combination of many things, but there was truly a belief that it was possible to be an ‘artist-saint’. I was interested in ethics, in a certain way of behaving, and of being a painter at the same time. It was a daft notion but a very powerful one; hence the Schweitzer thing and all that. I thought it was a right and honourable thing to do: that if I was going to be painting about people and in some way about the human condition then I should live in it—even if I created it somewhat theatrically around me, which is what I did.

How did your well-to-do neighbours in Hampstead take to your studio being the focus for so many difficult people?

There were many complaints. I was attracting these quite unsavoury people. I did realise later that people like Lofty were stealing and bringing the stuff round and hiding it in my studio. I was very naive about all sorts of things.

I also had eleven heroin addicts and that’s when it started to get more serious. I had them for two years. Many nights I had to tie some of them up with rope and put a wooden spoon in their mouths to stop them choking on their own tongues from the effects of withdrawal. Some had been left at my house by ambulance men in the days of lobotomies; they had literally changed their minds while on the table about to undergo surgery and run out in their pyjamas. That was it for them—no doctor would touch them and they could only go cold turkey.

One of them hanged himself in my studio—I remember cutting him down. He had lost an eye a few months before diving through a chemist’s window to fix himself on a bottle of aspirin because he was so desperate. I painted a lot of them.

You left London in 1964. Why was that?

I was making money in all sorts of ways: sign writing or painting walls, whatever it might be to make a few pounds here and there. One day, I was painting The Felafel House sign near Swiss Cottage. I was some twenty feet up a ladder, it was late at night and suddenly the whole ladder lifted up with me on top of it.

I looked down and there were four or five policemen holding it.

They said, “We understand you’re leavin’, Mr Lannevitch.”

I said, “I’m sorry?”

They said, “We understand you’re leavin’.”

I said, “No, I have to finish this job.”

“We don’t mean the job. We’re talkin’ about the area—we ’eard you’re leavin’.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know anything about that.”

It was quite alarming; the whole ladder was swaying. I kept asking them to put the ladder down, but they kept on repeating this phrase. Eventually, it dawned on me what they meant. They gave me seven days to get out of London.

What did you do when you left London?

I’d been teaching in London, in Victoria and other places, and I had quite a good reputation with rough schools, with difficult classes; that seemed to be my forte. I took another teaching job in Cornwall at Lanreath, and so I left London. I didn’t much mind as I lived in my head. I took my library with me and converted a cottage called Trevauden—a three mile walk to the shop. I remember feeling very melancholy. I lived there for a year or so with my wife Mouse and our daughter Alice.

I was then seen on television by a man who worked for the Admiralty, a Mr Bryant. He offered me a place here in Plymouth, rooms in Clifton Street, and then slowly the same thing happened again. I’d find stray people in the streets of Plymouth or sleeping at the bus station and invite them back.

Were you selling work to support yourself?

No, we just scraped through on a very low standard of living. It never entered my head that the work would sell. I didn’t drink or smoke, no drugs; what money there was went on paint and books. Painting was a blindly obsessive activity, there were no self-conscious thoughts about what its purpose or function might be. It was a bit like being an alcoholic I suppose.

Did you see the down and outs as victims of society in the liberal sense or take a more medieval view of them as interesting characters?

The latter, I think. I did have what I would have construed as compassion for them and this was known by the visitors. There could have been forty to sixty people at Clifton Street, Keppel Terrace, Rectory Road. That was the most notorious place, where I met The Bishop, Les ‘Cider’ Ryder, Corky, Cockney Jim, Snowy and all the other dossers or down and outs—hundreds of them.

Was there camaraderie amongst the vagrants themselves?

It was very superficial; the drink came first—drink, drink, drink. It was really false camaraderie. Les Ryder, after all those years on the road, hasn’t a single friend; just an immense cachet of stories and memories which he can barely articulate—you have to sit with him very patiently. Les will be guest of honour at the opening of the Retrospective along with Terry Waite. In his own way, Les has suffered like Terry Waite—total isolation, but for all of his life. Finally, illness and disease dragged him into hospital and here he is, a survivor.

There was a view emerging in the sixties, Foucault’s ‘Madness and Civilization’ for instance, that madness had its own wisdom and was in some sense a triumph over the blandness of modern society—did you share that point of view?

I must say that I was definitely aware of that—R.D. Laing, for instance. Right from the start I just accepted them as they were. I knew that you couldn’t do anything for them. I had no desire to change them. What I did want to do was to produce a painting project and to see if I could get them to talk, which I did in no uncertain terms. Some of these people were quite insightful. I was interested in their amorality and their psychotic behaviour. I did think that there were insights to be gained. There was almost a prophet-like quality about some of them. I was very taken with the ‘Caspar Hauser’ metaphor later developed by Werner Herzog.

It got very difficult at times—you could find yourself in aggressive or dangerously violent situations. I saw a mountain of terrible things. Your patience was tested to the most extreme degree, no matter how much attention you gave to them or what alleged kindnesses you performed. You had to be very careful that you never deluded yourself, that you never expected a reward or gratitude. None of those thoughts could enter your head, otherwise you were a fool to yourself and to them.

Did you feel that you were preparing a documentary record of vagrancy?

Very much so. I liked the idea that I could put together a body of information on a theme, no matter how transitory, and that that information could somehow be a microcosm of the macrocosm, could be a metaphor. But at the same time I could only do that innocently and energetically if I did not worry about art. If I worried about art it couldn’t be done.

I decided that I was not to worry whether I was going to be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ painter, or a ‘modern’ painter, or ‘a man of my times’. I had to consciously shut these things out and in the process I rather shut off my connections with other painters. I thought that the humanitas involved in putting this Project together was of more importance and more depth than any art theory.

Once you had created the Vagrancy Project and put art to the service of social documentary, did your view of art history alter—did you find your sympathies with certain painters changing? What about examples like Géricault’s paintings of the insane?

I would have sympathised with very few painters but had a great deal of sympathy with social theorists, philosophers and theologians.

As for Géricault’s work at La Salpêtrière, I found it very interesting. However, Géricault still saw himself as a bit of an aristocrat. Of course, we just don’t know enough—he died at thirty-seven, the great 19th century mystery. He would probably have been the greatest painter of that century had he lived.

The collection of illustrations of one or two heads and arms from La Salpêtrière seem exaggerated if one looks carefully. But The Raft of the Medusa, with all its sociological implications, is very intriguing. The sheer colourlessness of it—it is basically a monochrome—creates tremendous intensity. However, his greatest intensity is to be found in his paintings of horses, particularly The Roman Race—tremendously impassioned.

Some of the sitters for the Vagrancy Project feature regularly. Would you tell us more about them?

It’s very true to say that I would form deeper relationships with some of the ‘cowboys’, dossers, alcoholics, vagrants, call them what you will, than with others.

The most startling of them all was ‘The Bishop’, as he was called—Albert Edward Ernest Fisher. He was a most extraordinary man. He was an alcoholic; he slept rough most of the time and he was at the Salvation Army for many years. He constructed this posh Oxford accent even though he would say, “Derbyshire born, Derbyshire bred. Strong in the arm, weak in the head.” He would come up with very sweet epithets, particularly when drunk.

He was a tragic figure. He would sometimes stand just over there and start to recite poetry that he had learned by rote at school, some sort of special school for orphans. He could never recite much without tears pouring down his face in the most sentimental way. He was quite an unsentimental character usually, but anything that related to youth, to the passing of things or to winged creatures would move him. “The albatross sleeps on the wing. I sleep on the wing!” he would say. He could quote large sections of ‘The Ancient Mariner’.

I asked him to open the Vagrancy exhibition; there was a huge painting called The Apotheosis of Albert Fisher, now lost, which was about sixty feet long and showed The Bishop rising up into the air with the local policeman, another hundred figures at the base.

How did he see himself: as a victim of society or as an independent soul?

As a free man, definitely. Large hands, great red beard—he’d stand just as comfortably in the rain as in the heat. He’d arrange himself as neatly as a parson when he sat down saying, “Always keep the creases in your trousers. Don’t shit ’em or that’ll have the creases out!” He’d say it almost like clockwork as he neatly arranged himself, even if he was only sitting down for a minute.

He would sleep in graveyards and believed himself to have mystical experiences; he admired William Blake. He would sleep beneath a tree in Stoke Damerel graveyard here in Plymouth. He came rushing in one day and said that the sun had been shining through the tree, that every single leaf had turned into a man with a top hat, that each man with a top hat had a pint of beer in his hand and that each and every one of them had wished him “Good morning!”

“I had a vision there,” he said. “Not a dream, not a nightmare, but a vision there!” I did several paintings of this.

And the other dossers?

There was The Singer, Christopher Byrne, who would turn up without fail with a rose in his lapel. I never knew where he got them from—a new one every morning for years. Long white hair and long grey beard. He was a very gentle man and he loved singing.

Of course, there was Diogenes. His real name was Edward McKenzie and he was sometimes known as Blackie or Steptoe. In fact, it was rather amusing because I was doing a drawing one day of the character who played the son of Steptoe in the television series…

Harry H. Corbett… ?

That’s the man, yes. I was doing a quick drawing of him and Diogenes walked in and I said, “Oh, Mr Corbett, meet Steptoe.” Corbett was very amused.

Edward McKenzie: I called him Diogenes after the philosopher who lived in a barrel because I found him living in a concrete barrel, a circular container, in the crook of a tree looking down onto Chelson rubbish tip, a precipitous drop, and he had lived in there for nine years. I remember lifting up some of the coats that he slept on to find the whole thing teeming with maggots, so he was a pretty rough and ready character. He certainly looked like your archetypal medieval scholar, Trithemius von Spanheim say, with a great beard and so on.

I became friendly with him and began to visit him up there and do watercolours of him on site. There is a coloured photograph on the front cover of one of the early Telegraph magazines which shows me, young and beardless, drawing him and Diogenes smoking his pipe, which he had smoked since he was twelve. If Diogenes was to be believed, then he had designed and built the Civic Centre building; he had a market garden business with 300 employees; he had won the Grand National once and the Derby twice; he had played for Arsenal; and he had built the Tamar Bridge. And these are only some of his achievements. But he was a most endearing, colourful character, who funnily enough did not get on very well with children; he could be quite snappy and irritable. He was very popular here and he had a charming way with him and he was no fool.

I understand he moved into your studios?

He lived in this and surrounding buildings with me for fifteen years. Then, as he was dying, we had an understanding; he very much had the policy of “live while you can and live in clover, when you’m dead, you’m dead all over” —he didn’t much care what happened to the corpse. After he died I kept the agreement, which was to take the corpse, the “vacated premises”, and pass it on to a local funeral parlour who could embalm him effectively, and this was done. And it was done effectively because I have the corpse to this day.

There was a lot of fuss. I kept quiet about it for six or seven weeks, but then someone complained to the health authorities that no one had been buried or cremated under the name of Edward McKenzie. I can remember when I had to register the death they asked me, “Is he going to be buried or cremated?” And I said, “He’s not going to be buried,” which was exactly the case. They assumed that he was going to be cremated, but actually I hadn’t said so, so that was all sorted.

However, the health authorities came along here some seven weeks later; they got very upset about it and I asked them to leave. I had already made enquiries; there was no property in a body, finder’s keepers, an example of possession being nine-tenths of the law. “It might ’appen in Mexico or in Sicily, Mr Lannevitch, but it ain’t going to ’appen in Plymouth.” I reminded them that it already had happened; there was a Palaeolithic man and two Egyptian mummies in the City Museum—was the objection to mine simply that it was new? I wasn’t even going to exhibit it, yet there were 15,000 exhibited corpses in England alone.

Anyway, they weren’t having it and one thing led to another. For a few weeks the world went mad, the press and so on… I was made to look completely unhinged, whereas originally it was just a rather unusual philosophical artefact whose fate had been agreed upon by myself and the artefact. Eventually, there had been so many break-ins in different studios and at my house to look for the corpse that it got rather fatiguing. So with a close friend of mine we arranged, with the help of a couple of journalists, that the corpse would arrive here at a certain time and for the health authorities to hear about this. My friend drove this big lorry and half a dozen associates of mine placed this large box outside the front door here. There were about seven or eight strange people outside, very smartly dressed, pretending to take photographs of the mural like innocent tourists, even though it was freezing weather. We’d also been informed that round the corner a hearse had mysteriously appeared.

We let the health authorities freeze there for a couple of hours because we knew they couldn’t seize the corpse on the Queen’s highway; they would have to seize it on my property. It was then brought in and they did indeed burst in very aggressively, held a couple of people up against the wall and took some kind of crowbar to the box and lifted the lid. I sat up, wrapped in a duvet with a hot water bottle. I had a large sign in Latin, saying “Verumne tenet TSW”—“Does local television tell lies?”—and then “HABEAS CORPUS”. Well, they were quite apoplectic. This incident was reported in the local papers along with all the other nonsense and they were embarrassed into silence. They left me alone from then on.

Your purpose in the experiment?

I was building up a library on the theme of death and I thought that at one point it would be very nice if the library room on death had artefacts that related to the theme. I had all kinds of things; an unusual collection of skulls and objects of one kind or another that related to death, and felt there couldn’t be anything more thought provoking than the corpse of a human being. Had I had my wits about me earlier on, I would have much preferred my mother, but Diogenes was fine. It was surprising how many visits and letters I got from people offering me the same service; that is to say, that they would also like to be embalmed.

What kind of reaction did the corpse provoke amongst people who saw it?

There was a phrase I used: that one can be very struck by the total presence of the corpse and the total absence of the person, particularly if one knew the person. This is the primary sensation, in my view, that one gets in viewing a dead body, and I’ve seen many—the total absence of the person running parallel with the total presence of the corpse. And the corpse has menace, has potential for decay and putrefaction, almost like an attacking machine, but the person has curiously vapourized. I’m not making claims for self or soul or essence or spirit; I regard these all as poetic metaphors. But in witnessing a corpse one can certainly understand how these poetic metaphors arise.

Diogenes used to look after the studio and the exhibitions. Can you explain more about the actual set-up of the premises at the time? I don’t think it was quite the whole building as it is now?

It started downstairs in the front window from 1969 onwards. And derelict buildings in the area that I would break into and take over. But slowly I spread through the whole building. That in itself is a long story with all kinds of chicaneries, but eventually I took over the whole building and decided to open all the rooms as spaces for presenting the Projects.

When you ascended the first flight of stairs there was a kind of arched opening where the door had been removed and Diogenes sat there, by a desk. There was a 10p entrance fee; Diogenes would be sitting there and would go “Ar… Ar… Ar.” That’s about it really. Sometimes, they’d ask him a question and he’d go, “Ar… Ar.” He did it for fifteen years and he was very popular, but there were times when I wasn’t sure whether people were coming in to see Diogenes or coming in to see the exhibition. They were certainly very surprised by him as they came up the stairs—this scrawny, miniature Father Christmas.

How did the dossers look upon your painting them?

Bishop enjoyed it—he loved posing. Most never commented except for Black Sam. He was a gypsy, a fine pianist, who eventually committed suicide. He had burnt his house to the ground in a drunken incident, with his mother inside it—he could never come to terms with that. He said, “I’d like to move to Scotland and get myself a dog. My ears are so full of noise.” But he never did. He came to the opening night of the Vagrancy exhibition and said, “Fine stuff, fine stuff! But when I looks at the pictures of lads I feels like I’m in a mortuary.”

I think the others probably did find it strange—Scarface Fitz, Brighton, Mouth McCarthy, Psycho Jock, Big Brummie, just to mention a few of them.

Was this your normal day to day world?

No, there was a life apart from it. There were relationships with friends and with women, but sometimes the two worlds just couldn’t mix. One day I would be at Port Eliot with my friend the Earl of St. Germans in delightful company, and the next day I’d be washing the vomit off a tramp’s corpse.

Was what you did, such as giving the dossers a roof over their heads, motivated by altruism?

It may appear to have been, but I am revolted by any notion of altruism. I have often thought about that and I shy away from the idea of altruism immediately. I have to be quite sure that my motivations are aesthetic and intended to achieve a certain end. I don’t for one moment even want to hint at suggesting that I am concerned for the welfare of another human being; to me that would be blind, ignorant,

insensitive and thuggish.

Was there ever a feeling that they were exploiting you or you them?

I certainly felt that I was exploiting them, but I don’t recollect a single comment along those lines from them. However, it wasn’t an issue for me. The notion of exploitation wouldn’t have had any meaning for me at that time because I was even more psychotic then than I am now!

Their greatest strength was that they knew that nobody gave a shit and neither did they. If anyone thought they cared about them they’d take him to the cleaners. Brother Blair was the main one for that. He’d say, “The ones I really want to get are the do-gooders. I don’t believe a fuckin’ word of it!”

Where did you house the vagrants in Plymouth?

I’d break into warehouses, disused premises, put new padlocks on them and get neighbouring shops to put in an extension lead for a single light. There were nine warehouses in all.

Did this bring you into conflict with the police again?

Yes, but they really did see sense—at least they knew where all the dossers were. I had good relations with local hospitals and we got 170 beds, mattresses and cabinets.

There was a book at each one of the places if I wanted to record anything. It was marvelous chaos. Two or three were studios, the rest weren’t suitable. I arranged for each place to have a supervisor; it could be anyone. So one was looked after by Diogenes; Wells Street was run by a fellow called Pete and a chap called Gypsy Joe. Unfortunately, they were really using the place for prostitution and made good money out of it—I didn’t discover that for two years!

The other places I looked after myself. Sometimes, there were altercations and one had to make quick decisions. I’d find myself in situations of physical violence and that was wearing and unpleasant. You didn’t know when they’d next come through the door and go for you.

Some of your paintings from that impoverished period are on sailcloth or parachute silk...

Yes, any old rubbish. A lot of that stuff was brought to me by the dossers themselves. There was endless ingenuity. However, there was no end to the daily stress; a difficulty and a problem every minute, and it was night and day.

I realised my enthusiasm was waning—I was expending an enormous amount of energy. By the time the Project had ended I had begun to question the point of doing it. In fact, I ended up doing it for twenty-six years.

Do you feel regret that you didn’t have the idea of the Projects while you were at the Hotel Shemtov?

It’s interesting you should say that because I often think of it. I got near to it in a completely blind innocent way by painting all those people.

If the incident at Passover in your youth with the schnorrer had not occurred, do you think the Vagrancy Project and all that came after would never have happened?

Well, I often wonder about this. That incident and many others. I think the answer is probably not. I think they would probably not have occurred. Sometimes, we only know what we think when we hear ourselves say it; so I think probably not.

So did you believe that the Vagrancy Project would have a liberal, educative effect on its audience?

Oh, yes! I thought that it would be possible to make a difference. It was very schmaltzy, very romantic, and done to galvanize a small community into action.

I invited the Lord Mayor to the opening. He wouldn’t come, but some representative of his did come along on the opening night—there were over 500 people milling about in the studio—and gave speeches about how fortunate it was that Plymouth didn’t have a vagrancy problem; either these characters were figments of my imagination or they had visited the town and then left. It was at that point that I gave a prearranged signal and 73 dossers entered the room, most of them drunk, and they wrecked the whole evening.

I recall the newspaper articles at the time saying “Poet and painter saves the tramps” or something. There was a folk poet involved who wrote a poem about the exhibition. He bought the painting Albert Shitting His Trousers and then gave it back to me to present to the Lord Mayor along with his poem, which I did. They accepted the painting because they didn’t notice the shit portrayed, but it was discovered a couple of days later and they were very offended.

Did you think that collective political action could make a difference or did you think it down to individuals?

My view was that a small community of people could alter things, but I don’t think I much cared about that. I thought I did then, but looking back I don’t think I did or was capable of doing so.

I did form very intense relationships with these people and had all kinds of traumatic experiences. However, the justification for it all was that here was a body of information, the paintings and the dossers’ own stories, that may or may not be useful after the event.

Why did you create the ‘Project’ format of exhibiting large numbers of paintings backed up with research notes?

I thought that this was a good way of painting about something. I was very unattracted to the idea of the artist intensively trying to represent all his thoughts, feelings, etc., about something in one image; to me this was the height of aesthetic fascism. But in one hundred images—to me there was more humility in that, particularly one hundred images that didn’t worry about high art. In that way there would be more attention to the event than to your record of it.

So you weren’t tempted to rank in order of preference your own individual paintings?

My true interest was the atmosphere I got from the whole exhibition—that was the painting. When you see the whole Project, that’s the picture, not the one painting. I think that all painters know in their heart that their whole output is one painting cut up into many bits over their lifetime. I know that would irritate them and they would claim that each painting had its own north, east, south and west, but I can’t subscribe to that.

I didn’t want to worry about ‘art’. I was more interested in the fact of a thing, in presenting information without being overcomplicated and in presenting it by visual means.

So when you look round one of your Project exhibitions do you never think that one or two paintings are more significant than others?

I would, in a certain phase, think “that’s a stronger piece”, but I’m being very nostalgic when I do that. All those addictive, aesthetic assumptions one has been trained into by books, by art history, by critics, come into effect. I can make those sort of judgements with other painters since they are innocents in that land, but where I am concerned I feel I am an outsider. I can step into it in an academic frame of mind, but I don’t get emotionally attached to specific paintings.

At the same time as the Vagrancy exhibition you were working on the Barbican Mural; how did that fit in to your work at that time?

It was only insofar as it was still part of the scale of the thing; I was still quite young and very preoccupied with painting on a large scale. I was unsympathetic to street murals; they can sometimes be seen as record covers on a large scale, they’re transitory, and they look a mess after a couple of years, especially if you use British paint, which I did. So it was a large-scale painting, 3,000 square feet. It dealt with the influence of Jewish thought on Elizabethan philosophy, 1580-1620.

To what do you attribute its popularity?

I think really just that it was large and dramatic-looking. It looked like an easel painting, was fairly literal and was reasonably skilled. As one lady said to me, seizing my sleeve, “Oh Mr Lannevitch, your paintings look really, really real, don’t they, they look really, really real, I mean really, really, don’t they look really, really real?”

Once you had amassed this collection of paintings on the theme of Vagrancy, did you not consider the normal art channel of approaching a gallery to exhibit the work? You seem to have gone ahead and put on your own exhibition without thinking of any alternative.

No, I never considered that. I had no knowledge of it. I was in a provincial area, completely isolated. I saw a few little galleries around, but there was no serious gallery in this city and it just never entered my head.

In fact, it seemed to me absolutely logical that no one else should have to pay for anything, and that I should just get on with it if I wanted to. I was very aware of the example of Courbet setting up a tent to exhibit his work independently. I’m not comparing either the work or the motive to the Courbet incident, but I was aware of it. I was very attracted to the idea of remaining independent and just setting up my own Projects and I’ve held that position most of my life.

Did you ever have to resist the approaches of galleries later on?

I can’t think of any single gallery, certainly in those years, that approached me. Later, I certainly had a lot of lightweight enquiries and one visit to Cork Street, or Bond Street, or wherever it was, to a gallery show that I agreed to do against my better judgement. I regretted it, but it was a damp squib and was nicely forgotten.

Your work did attract the interest of several patrons, some of whom have collected your work extensively for many years.

It was odd how that happened. People would come along and they would offer money, not much, for the paintings, and I would say, “Well, I’d just rather you paid the bills.” I was cheap to run at that time as I was not indulging in book collecting on a grand scale. So in brief, a number of people from different walks of life, some in the medical profession, some in the law, some in university professions and some quite ‘ordinary’ people, were attracted to collecting the work. They did that as innocently, I think, as I produced it.

Your overheads were quite large with respect to the upkeep of the dossers and so you were forced on occasion to emulate Robin Hood again.

Yes. In order to keep a place called Rectory Road going, it was necessary to subsidize the incomes of the tenants. We found that one of the best ways of doing that was to visit derelict buildings for lead and copper, which I did for many years. I would do it with a chap called Wally who could tell what kind of metal various plumbings were, even though they’d been painted over, just by tapping them in the darkness with a candle.

I can remember where the Theatre Royal is now, there used to be a large set of derelict civil defence buildings and that was certainly a very good site for lead and copper. Wally’s expertise was used to identify materials and my expertise at that time was brute strength. You couldn’t saw or hammer; one had to be discreet and careful. My function was to bend or break the ‘gear’ off the walls, which took some quite forceful wrenching at times, and then to carry it. It was often more than a couple of hundredweight, but I was quite good at that kind of thing. We were given an average of eight to ten pounds in cash for the stuff each time by some scoundrel.

One of these escapades resulted in a short time in prison, did it not?

As for the incident that landed me in jail, I wince when I think of it as I sit in my own library. The City Museum here in Plymouth had a collection of old books. As far as I could tell the books had not been looked at since before the First World War. Anyway, it was possible, with the unwitting assistance of some of the staff, to gain access to the collection and to get the cabinet open. Then they would have to be distracted—that was achieved quite simply by the unexpected visit of a few children—and then I would just slip an appropriate item into my pocket. I’d already made a valuation and paginated it on a previous visit.

Later, I would meet a charming antiquarian dealer who believed that they were from my own collection, and the money from the sale was then used for the dossers’ food. It’s not something I would do now, but only because my aesthetics on those issues have altered.

This went on for some four years and then suddenly, for some reason or other, the staff noticed. When the police came along, I came to the door and I said, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you for four and a half years. Do you take sugar in your tea?” They were very fatigued because there had been some seventy suspects and they’d investigated all of them before coming to me. They’d been advised by somebody at the City Museum not to bother Mr Lenkiewicz because “he’s a gentleman.” So they made me the last visit, and they did have tea, and they told me that all would be well, and it wasn’t. I found myself in prison. But only for a couple of months or something. So at twenty-five or so, I found myself in Exeter Prison and it was an unattractive experience, but very thought provoking. I did a lot of work and notes there.

There was another incident where you played Santa rather than Robin Hood, wasn’t there?

Oh yes! It was the day before Christmas Eve; there was no money and I had rather a lot of children to think about and knew other people who did, too. I remember we’d been chucked out of our home at three in the morning; the landlord turned up with the police and chucked us out into the rain with everything we owned. I was with a friend of mine and her children and possibly one of my own.

My only recourse was to find some lead and copper in a derelict building. It was possibly the only occasion on which I was going to spend some of the money on a few toys for Christmas and the rest for food for the cowboys. So you can imagine our surprise when Wally and I entered this building and saw a forty or fifty foot long table, with chairs all the way round like a grand council chamber, absolutely covered in toys. On reflection, it was obviously the result of some charitable activity, and so I took the liberty of regarding myself as a charity, or at any rate as of charitable status, and took quite a few in my coat. We returned with the booty and the children were delighted.

Most of the vagrants you knew then are dead now, but you still put on a Christmas Day dinner for others every year at Plymouth’s bus station.

Yes, apart from Les Ryder not one of them has survived. The dinner used to be in my house; it’s only been at the bus station for the last twenty years. Until four or five years ago I used to have the food donated by local shops or restaurants, but that is so tiring now. It’s rather sad when they refuse. The gin distillery across the road never ever gave anything—“Not our policy.” I go there every year to ask, just to irritate them.

Has the face of vagrancy changed much in twenty-five years? Are there less ‘cowboys’ and more displaced young people?

It’s almost unrecognisable. It got to a point where there were almost a million street alcoholics, but nowadays people would say “Where are they?” They’re still there, but one young person in the gutter blots out fifty old ones in the public’s mental eye. The fifty are still there; that’s why they are called ‘the invisible people.’ Alcoholism is still an incomparably larger problem than drugs.

Your opposition to the products of the breweries is well known. Have you ever had a tipple yourself or did you inhale anything in the sixties?

I’ve remained a good Jewish boy in that regard. Someone I’m painting at the moment, a gambler, for the Project on Addictive Behaviour, is Jewish and he asked me, “How many Jewish alcoholics have you known?” I said, “I’ve known more Jewish gamblers!” It’s quite a rare phenomenon in European Jews—it’s something about making a nuisance of oneself. Drugs and drink: I’ve seen a great deal, but I’ve never been attracted. Perhaps it’s because I’m uncomfortable with losing control.

When someone left your exhibition on Vagrancy, would you have wanted them to fish a pound out of their pockets for the next dosser they saw?

I would want them to think “I won’t fish out a pound because all I would do is strengthen the breweries.” That would be a highly satisfactory reaction.

© 1997 White Lane Press