The Lenkiewicz Tradition Lives On - Robert Lenkiewicz's son's exhibition in King's Cross

Published: 02 June 2011
by JOHN GULLIVER

BUSHY bearded, with a jolly boatswain’s face, his hat set at a sea shanty angle, the old man looked every inch a sailor down on his luck as he blew a jolly tune on his flute while busking in a busy Bristol street.

He was, in fact, an old deck-hand, now down and out, living in a sheltered home.

I thought he would have made  a wonderful subject for that great unfashionable artist Robert Lenkiewicz whose latest show Still Lives I had just visited moments earlier on Monday evening at the nearby magnificent hall of the Royal West of   England Academy.

Lenkiewicz had been drawn for decades to down and outs, the mentally handicapped, the nation’s pariahs, whose portraits he painted with great affection and astonishing draughtsmanship. 

He went where few other artists ever go.

I confess I have become a bit of a stalker of Lenkiewicz’s shows in the past few years – Exeter, Mayfair, Camden Town, I have not missed one. The other day I heard of a show in Torquay in July – and I know nothing will hold me back.

Though familiar with Lenkiewicz, the sheer size of the canvases at the Academy, many measuring 20 feet by 10 feet at least – and some created from abandoned sailcloth – made me gasp.

One showed the haunted faces of elderly men and women who had fled from the Nazis and found refuge in his parents’ Shem Tov hotel in West Hampstead in the 1960s. He had painted them as a young teenager, probably while a student at St Martin’s College of Art and Design. Then he had found lodgings in the Primrose Hill area, before decamping to Plymouth, glad to turn his back on the fashionable London art scene.

He died at 61 in 2002, finally accepted by Plymouth as a bit of an eccentric who had had 12 “wives”, some of whom I have met over the years.

In some ways his is a typical artist’s tale. He lived in poverty most of his life and now dead his works can fetch anything up to £60,000.

But a certain relic from the past drew curious visitors at the exhibition – an embalmed body in a glass case. It was the preserved corpse of a tramp – called “Diogenes” by Lenkiewicz – that the artist had kept in his studio. At the time in the 1980s it had made the  authorities huff and puff, headlines filled the Press, but Diogenes remained in the studio.  

Now Diogenes is the property of the Lenkiewicz Foundation who had to gain the approval of a government quango, the Human Tissue Authority, before  exhibiting  it. 

Very protective of Diogenes, the Foundation had been advised to ban visitors from photographing it.

Bemused, I asked why.

“Oh,” said an attendant, “people are known to do funny things with a corpse!”

Unfortunately, the exhibition, one of the best attended at the hall in recent years, closed on Tuesday.

• The Lenkiewicz Tradition Lives On – an exhibition by the artist’s son Wolfe, is currently on show at 2 Omega Place, King’s Cross. Wolfe’s works were admired at a recent show in Moscow and are now beginning to attract attention.