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‘Jack the Burglar in Checked Shirt’
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Final testament of a unique artist
Artist Robert Lenkiewicz had 12 ‘wives’ and kept the embalmed corpse of a tramp in his studio, writes John Gulliver
WHY do many women find artists irresistible?You would think this must be the case if you consider the exuberant life of the consummate artist Robert Linkiewicz.
Altogether, he is said to have lived with at least 12 women, all of whom art connoisseurs and friends affectionately refer to as Robert’s ‘wives.’
I am not writing in envy. Morals aside, I think I have neither the temperament nor the energy.
But, perhaps, it is a sign of the world we live in nowadays that whenever friends of Lenkiewicz’s get together, almost invariably someone will start talking about his ‘wives.’
One of them, apparently, has been ringing me over the past year ever since she heard – quite wrongly – that I had bought one of his paintings of her at an auction of his works at Exeter
Suddenly, Lenkiewicz, who died five years ago has come into fashion for the first time, and this week a major London exhibition of some of his works opened at the West End gallery of Halycon.
Lenkiewicz would smile at this because he had always shunned the London art scene, and eventually found his home in Plymouth.
Born in 1951 he grew up in Fordywch Road, West Hampstead, the son of Jewish refugees.
He trained at St Martin’s school of art and immediately showed signs of being a very original and talented artist.
Now more preoccupied with his own paintings than the art college, his studio attracted disturbed and poor people, often criminals. One of them hanged himself in his studio.
Perhaps understandably, his lifestyle upset his neighbours and following complaints he was persuaded to move on by the police.
Perhaps it was that which made him move to the West Country to find expression.
It would not have been a difficult decision to make because London held little attraction for him.
Not for him any kind of punk art or paintings that hit you in the face, paintings where you have to search for a meaning. Usually, he was representational in style though experimentally he dabbled in abstracts, but for his real subjects he looked outward – among the people of Plymouth.
Naturally, he would paint his many women, and all in his usual Rembrandtian style, with wonderful craftsmanship. But for him what was more important was what became known as his ‘projects.’ So, he set out to find Plymouth’s down-and-outs, the deformed, the drug addicts, the women of the streets.
He developed a philosophy about which he wrote extensively setting out the concept that falling in love, sexual coupling, was akin to that of an addiction. Was it here that he began to be attracted to addicts and the dejected?
Shortly after arriving in Plymouth in 1969, he invited as many tramps and down-and-outs to his studio so that he could paint them.
I first saw his paintings at the Exeter auction 18 months ago. It was the second national auction of his works following his death.
The executors of his will had been forced to sell off hundreds of paintings to try and meet a bill of £2 million owed to Inland Revenue. The first by Sotheby’s apparently, raised more than £1 million. The one in Exeter pulled in nearly £800,000, all proceeds finding their way into government coffers.
He owed a huge tax bill because, invariably, whenever he sold a painting he would immediately spend the money on rare books for which he had developed a passion. In fact, his present library of invaluable antiquarian books are stored in a hall in Plymouth, and are said to be worth a fortune.
I was bowled over when I stepped into the large, hangar-style hall in Exeter where his works were auctioned. There must have been more than 150 paintings on auction – of all sorts. Portraits of the actors Charles Dance and Simon Callow, a mystical picture of rabbis in the style of Chagal, several of teachers and pupils, of handicapped people, of his ‘wives’, and a few pornographic which, I gather, he dashed off for the porn market, hungry for money to buy his precious books.
He never sought a career. He wasn’t interested in becoming a celebrity. He may sound vain and someone impossible to live with, but he was more than all that. He had a gut feeling for the underclass, those whom artists by and large ignore. Using his extraordinary skill, he made them come alive.
Paul Green, who runs the Halcyon Gallery, began to take an interest in him in the early 1990s and staged his first big exhibition in Birmingham.
This week, he has curated his paintings of down-and-outs, supported by the Big Issue publication. Something about the poor drew Lenkiewicz. His studio in Plymouth opened onto the Barbican, a large open space in the centre of the city, and it became open house to schoolchildren and people of the street.
He took a tramp he befriended, called Diogenes, back to his studio where, on his death, with his agreement, he kept his embalmed body. When Lenkiewicz died the corpse of Diogenes was discovered.
You could say he was just behaving in his usual wild eccentric way. But friends believe the tramp had asked him to turn his home into his final resting place, and Lenkiewicz knew he had to oblige him.
Another great artist, Hogarth, who depicted the lives of the poor and the forgotten, is on also on exhibition this week at the Tate Britain.
Hogarth painted life in London’s slums of the 18th century.
In centuries ahead when people want to look at similar lives of the last century, they won’t find anything among the fashionable painters, they’ll have to turn to Lenkiewicz. This is Lenkiewicz’s final testament that has made him one of the most significant European painters of the last century.
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– See John Gulliver
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