The paperboy was nonplussed as I flung open the front door to snatch my copy of The Telegraph uncreased from his hands, though perhaps it was the sight of my Paisley jim-jams. But a 5,000 word article in a national Saturday magazine about our favourite ‘bad painter’ doesn’t come around every week. If the medium is the message, then Lenkiewicz has come a long way since all he could command was a gossipy page or two in Devon Today.

First, what the article isn’t: it’s not a review of the painter’s skill, but then I hardly expected that. However, Mick Brown is the genuine article when it comes to biography. A bit of research shows he has a book about Richard Branson under his belt and has interviewed Bob Dylan, the Dalai Lama and American writer Cormac McCarthy, at least two of whom are geniuses (one is a publicity hungry fat cat, and Branson is little better). But I’m astonished to learn that this is the same Mick Brown who wrote The Spiritual Tourist, a book I know and admire. It’s a peregrination through the outer realms of spiritual belief, hugely entertaining and written in a generous spirit of non-judgmental curiosity. Besides, anyone who knows what Van Morrison keeps in his fridge can’t be all bad.

The index page carries an excellent self-portrait from Project 10, and turning to the article proper one finds the first alluring photograph of Robert by Phillip Stokes of the artist at work with a model on his lap (madness that these images weren’t published every decade or so) opposite a detail of the lurid St Antony canvas. Starting to read, I wince slightly:

“When Lenkiewicz died of heart failure in his bed in August 2002… there was some discussion… as to whether he was really dead at all. Lenkiewicz after all, he (sic) had already ‘died’ once before…”

Oh no! Here we go again! But I remember my own challenge posted on this forum: how do you present Lenkiewicz to an audience that has never heard of him without touching at least some of these familiar bases?

Things pick up quickly. There’s a solid discussion of the state of the Estate with an accurate (that’s a first) statement of values, debts and the scope of the legacy. Lenkiewicz’s method of painting in Projects is explained well, picking up on the existence of related notebooks and diaries. The comment:

“At their best his paintings emanate a dark, brooding intensity. At worst they veer dangerously towards chocolate-box kitsch”

is fair; Lenkiewicz felt the same thing and said as much. Then:

“Taken together, they provide an encyclopaedia of his abiding obsessions and constitute one of the most singular… bodies of work of any (my italics) British artist of modern times.”

That is the most positive assessment of Robert’s art yet expressed in mainstream media. It’s not effusive praise, I grant you, but Brown is not an art expert and must have known of the utter critical black hole Robert inhabits. To risk saying even that puts him quite far out on a limb and raises the bar for future reviews. Brown’s previous book enables him to give an excellent treatment of The Round Room material:

“Lenkiewicz executed compendious notes and drawings… poring over them at Port Eliot, one realises the extraordinary breadth of scholarship that he brought to his work. …Kabbalistic thought, the writings of Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, disquisitions on dragons, griffins and the best way to catch a unicorn. (Hardly any of this seems to have found a way into the paintings itself…)”

This, to me, captures both the extraordinary breadth of the artist’s erudition, which he wore lightly, and the frustrating gap between inspiration and the flat limits of the canvas. But at least Brown sees that you have to take Lenkiewicz as the whole package.

If there’s something missing from the article, it’s an engagement with the paintings qua painting. However, since this is the first article not commissioned because Lenkiewicz had come up on the national radar thanks to a large exhibition, Brown cannot have had many opportunities to view the work. It’s one thing to look at an illustration in a book of The Burial of John Kynance, but quite another to stand before the 18ft canvas and gaze up at the watching figures from the point of view of the corpse in the coffin!

An interest in unusual ‘belief systems’ is an ideal qualification to opine on Lenkiewicz, and I suspect that if they had met, the artist would have warmed to Mick Brown. And I am informed that Brown never actually met Lenkiewicz or knew about him prior to this year. Which makes the article’s treatment of Robert’s theory on ‘aesthetic fascism’ even more impressive:

“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 hated both. The addiction to people was more insidious still, leading to extreme or fascistic behaviour. In the matter of love, the relationship one is having… is essentially with oneself – an addiction to one’s own ‘aesthetic vulnerability’.”

Lenkiewicz’s belief in the common origin of brutishness and love is the most subtle and challenging aspect of his thought and it is misunderstood or ignored by every other commentator: Mick Brown absolutely nails it. But then, this is probably the first journalist to look at Lenkiewicz who can actually read. The discussion of Robert’s relationship with Mary portrayed in The Mary Notebook confirms this:

“Lenkiewicz would record their every encounter in minute detail, meticulously noting each emotional shiver and physical tremor with almost clinical detachment and illustrating each page in hallucinatory vivid watercolours. The Mary Notebook… 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.”

Impossible to read that and not believe that Mick Brown has really read The Mary Notebook, which must be another journalistic first. In fact, I see that Whitelane Press have sensibly but cheekily used this passage as an endorsement on their new website. Never turn down a free plug!

The article concludes with a look at the library and its dissolution. Again, numbers are accurate: Brown hasn’t fallen for the exaggerations Lenkiewicz and his unquestioning disciples were prone to. He smartly picks out the most important rare books already sold off and neatly summarises the problems facing the estate.

If there’s one sour note running through the entire article, it’s the rent-a-quote problem. If the Lenkiewicz Foundation is looking for inexpensive methods to enhance Robert’s critical standing a thousand fold, they need only take out a gagging order on the Earl of St Germans.

“Lenkiewicz was a charlatan,” St Germans says. “But in the best possible sense of the word”.

Which is the last time you’ll ever see that second sentence properly attached to the first.

Or this:

“I think there was an element of Robert enjoying being a big fish in a small pool.”

Brown is enough of a journalist to have a good ear for the pithy characterization, but those who enthuse about Lenkiewicz aren’t media-savvy enough to vet their own pronouncements. However, I suspect this quote from St Germans is Brown slyly turning the tables:

“He was not at ease with posh or social people. He’d want to blind them with his knowledge in a rather didactic way. It was nervousness.”

Actually, as Robert sometimes confessed, it was sheer bloody boredom with gentrified table-talk. But Robert ‘nervous’ in anyone’s company, pauper or prince? Lenkiewicz struck me as someone who could go round to Hannibal Lecter’s house for dinner and still maintain his witty, urbane sang-froid… and teach Lecter a thing or two about obscure Florentine painters.

Perhaps Mick Brown is slipping in another portrait here of the class which would rather have their boarded sons be good at rugger than win a Nobel Prize; the class which invented the phrase “too clever by half”, a sentiment which would make no sense whatsoever to a Frenchman.

Summing up, I give Mick Brown a 7.5 out of 10. Yes, I would have liked him to risk an unqualified endorsement of the art, with reasoned arguments— and for his intended audience, some sort of guide to prices fetched by individual paintings would have been useful. But all in all, this is off the scale good compared to every other mainstream introduction to Lenkiewicz. The previous high was about 2.4.

The medium is the message: Lenkiewicz has arrived well-represented in the favourite rag of middle England, which I oddly suspect to be a receptive constituency not just for “the girlie pictures” (it’s a fair cop, guv’nor) but also for the darker undertones in his oeuvre. All that conservative repression has to have an outlet, you know.

I can’t wait to find out how the shires responded to this edition of The Telegraph landing on their Welcome mats. Did it hit with a particularly portentous thud this morning? Excuse me while I jump in the Land Rover and nip round to the nearest neighbour to find out. Looks windy out; where’s my Barbour?