ROBERT LENKIWICZ (1941 - 2002) - HIS LIFE AND WORK

Rarely in recent times can the death of an artist have elicited such an
emotional public response as that of Robert Oscar Lenkiewicz. The
sophisticates of the London art world may well put this down as a naïve
provincial phenomenon but Lenkiewicz's paintings communicated directly
with ordinary people, who recognised that here was not only an artist
of considerable talent but someone who had the power to make them
contemplate their own lives and the world they live in.

Like most things in his life, Lenkiewicz adopted a unique position
towards his own paintings. At an early age he made a conscious decision
to subjugate his skill to a greater service: to become a "presenter of
information" or a "sociological enquirer", as he usually termed it. By
this he meant to reveal the plain fact of a person or thing. For
Lenkiewicz, the act of painting was a profoundly moving experience. "To
paint oneself is to paint a portrait of someone who is going to die,"
Lenkiewicz would often remark when asked about his many self-portraits.
"And the same applies if one paints anybody else." His main aim was to
capture the transient and haunting qualities of his subject. He
recognised the limitations of art and considered it second best to the
mystery of his subject's sheer existence.

He began by recording the lives of the tramps in London and then
Plymouth in his huge project on Vagrancy. In an era remembered as the
"Swinging Sixties", Robert was spending most of his time painting the
down-and-outs, the mentally ill and the misfits of the affluent
society. Encouraged to leave London by the police for attracting too
many undesirables to his Hampstead studios, Lenkiewicz soon relocated
to Plymouth.

Lenkiewicz exhibited the Vagrancy Project in one of the warehouses he
had commandeered throughout the city to house the down-and-outs, known
as "Jacob's Ladder" (entrance was originally gained via a ladder). So
ignored were the vagrants that a council official opening the
exhibition remarked how fortunate Plymouth was to have very few
vagrants. Lenkiewicz had shrewdly anticipated this official blindness
and, on a signal from him, dozens of these "invisible people" flooded
into the room to make his point. Up until the year before his death,
Lenkiewicz had continued to provide a free Christmas dinner for the
homeless at Bretonside bus station.

Many of the colourful characters he painted became an integral part of
the Lenkiewicz myth, in particular Edward McKenzie, known as
"Diogenes", and Albert Fisher, known as "The Bishop". According to
Lenkiewicz, The Bishop was "an extraordinary man with large hands and a
great red beard. He would sleep beneath a tree in Stoke Damerel
graveyard and believed himself to have mystical experiences. 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!" In the posh Oxford
accent he had cultivated, he said, "I had a vision there. Not a dream,
not a nightmare but a vision there!"

This was the start of his series of projects, in which he examined the
lives of people living on the fringes of society: the mentally and
physically disadvantaged, the addicts, the criminals, the sick and
dying. He became the champion of the outsider. His Projects were large
in scale and ambition. Lenkiewicz recalled his fondness for the epic
scale whilst still a student. At St. Martin's College of Art, he
painted a canvas 364 feet long. "What happened, Lenkiewicz?" asked the
Principal. "I'm sorry?" Lenkiewicz replied. "Well, that painting, what
happened?" "I don't understand, " Lenkiewicz replied again. "Well, did
you run out of canvas?"

In 1971 Lenkiewicz's taste for the grand gesture led to his creation of
the famous Barbican mural, a painting 3000 feet square, dealing with
the influence of Jewish thought on Elizabethan philosophy. Although
Lenkiewicz was later rather embarrassed by it ("fairly skilled but
illustrational"), the mural became a landmark for Plymothians, as well
as visitors to the city. Unforgettably on April Fool's Day, as a result
of one of his regular disputes with the local Council, the artist with
typical wit whitewashed over it and replaced it with three flying
ducks! In many ways, the history of Lenkiewicz is the history of
Plymouth over the past thirty years.

He was the most hardworking of artists, obsessive in his desire to
record the event in front of him. To Lenkiewicz there was more humility
involved in presenting one hundred images on a theme that didn't worry
about high art than attempting to make the perfect painting. This
didn't stop him producing some haunting early individual pieces:
"Plymouth Mourning over its Unfortunates"; "The Lynch"; "The Burial of
John Kynance"; "Belle and Diogenes at prayer". The sombre colours -
greys, greens and earthy browns - give these paintings a reflective,
elegiac quality.

These years were a time of great poverty with a very low standard of
living in various studios around the city: Keppel Terrace, Clifton
Street and Rectory Road. During the winter he would be forced to burn
cardboard boxes in his studio to keep warm. The little money he earned
from selling paintings was spent on paint and canvas. Often he would
paint on parachute silk or sailcloth found in bins by the dossers
themselves. Many works from this period have rough seems stitched
across them.

In the late seventies in a series of more private Projects, "Love and
Romance", "Jealousy" and "The Painter with Mary", Lenkiewicz was not
afraid to turn his unflinching eye inwards, investigating his own
personal relationships, in particular what he called the "falling in
love experience". These he recorded with a manic intensity in paintings
and notebooks, often in a more subjective, allegorical pictorial style.
His conclusion in these investigations was that the addiction of the
lover to the loved one was similar, if not identical, to the addiction
of the alcoholic to drink or the fanatic to a belief. Thus was born his
philosophy of "aesthetic fascism", treating the other person as
property.

He applied this theory starkly on a sociological level in his
"Observations on Local Education" to society's treatment of the young.
In this project, he painted every head teacher in the city, memorably
capturing the gulf between the system's aspirations and its reality in
paintings such as "The Blind leading the Blind", "The Burial of
Education" and the "The Glue Sniffer", an extraordinary piece of
virtuoso painting. Lenkiewicz's hope was that people would see the
exhibition and think "Oh my God! These are the people teaching my
children!" Lenkiewicz thought it was as futile to try to argue someone
out of their cherished beliefs or prejudices as it was to talk them out
of thinking they were in love. His point was to shock them into a new
awareness, a new aesthetic understanding.

In 1994 this was followed by an ironic look at his own relationships in
"The Painter with Women: observations on the theme of the Double". For
the first time, Lenkiewicz chose to present the complete exhibition
elsewhere than his own studios at the International Convention Centre
in Birmingham. More than 35,000 people visited the show in a single
week, a figure easily surpassed in 1997 by his first exhibition in a
public gallery, the Robert Lenkiewicz Retrospective at Plymouth City
Museum.

But time was running out. His health was failing, the result of a
serious heart condition. Undaunted, he began his largest project yet on
"Addictive Behaviour" with plans for over 800 sitters. His aim was to
cover every "addictive scenario", including alcoholism, theological
convictions and obsessive relationships, but the project remained
unfinished at the time of his death.

Lenkiewicz will be remembered as a genuine outsider and radical,
consciously at odds with current thinking on ethical and artistic
issues. He cared less about the opinion of the art critic than that of
the man-in-the-street. His art is generous in its ability to
communicate with ordinary people, who are little interested in the more
esoteric world of contemporary art; it is democratic and humane but
never sentimental. Above all, his paintings reveal people for what they
are without moral judgement. If the task of the artist is to show what
it was to be alive in a certain time and in a certain place, then the
qualities of Robert Lenkiewicz's work will increasingly become clear to
future generations.

Reproduced with the kind permission of White Lane Press © White Lane Press, 2004.