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)