Body Of Work - Mick Brown feature article published in The Telegraph newspaper
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.

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 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.

“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