“To paint oneself is to paint a picture of someone who is going to die. The same applies if one paints anybody else.”

R. O. Lenkiewicz (1941-2002)

R. O. Lenkiewicz: Self-Portraits 1956-2002 collects together more than 30 self-portraits spanning the painter’s entire career.

Lenkiewicz, uniquely amongst post-war British artists, conceived of his paintings not as individual works but as related parts of ‘Projects’: large scale exhibitions of paintings on specific themes accompanied by the publication of statements by the sitters. The first, Vagrancy, exhibited in 1973, began a series of ‘social enquiries by visual means’ and included a remarkable booklet collecting together the sayings and recollections of the dossers, or ‘cowboys’, themselves and those involved in their care and management. Projects such as Mental Handicap (1976), Old Age (1979), Suicide (1980) and Death (1982) followed as Lenkiewicz continued to examine the lives of ostracized, hidden sections of the community, or isolated people in extremis, and bring them to the attention of the general public.

Each Project, of which twenty had been completed at the time of the artist’s death, formed part of The Relationship Series, a broad investigation of the human condition. The Vagrancy Project, despite its overt campaigning intentions, was also conceived as a study of ‘Melancholy, Fool Symbolism and The Dance of Death’; its characteristic palette of sombe blues, greens and greys reflect this. Many of the Projects which followed also have, as a unifying thread, the loneliness of existence and the melancholy induced by the passing of time.

In a parallel line of inquiry, Lenkiewicz also investigated the nature of personal relationships in ironically titled Projects such as Love & Romance (1976), Love & Mediocrity (1976), and Orgasm (1978). Here Lenkiewicz often adopted an allegorical pictorial style to portray human physiology in a state of crisis. The conclusions he drew from his observations remain deeply unsettling: that love was delusional in nature and led to obsessive and addictive patterns of behaviour. According to Lenkiewicz, who for many years had dealt with the pyschoses of street alcoholics and addicts on a daily basis, ‘the falling in love scenario’ was the deepest addiction of all and potentially the most harmful: ‘I often feel that in the most intense romantic scenarios, particularly as expressed in poetry or literature, there is an undertone of ruthless psychopathic expectation, a curious heartlessness. If one had genuine ‘concern’ for one’s partner then the first thing one would do is leave them.’ The fullest statement of this theme is to be found in the Projects Jealousy (1977) and The Painter With Mary: a Study of Obsessional Behaviour (1981).

In 1978, Lenkiewicz exhibited the Self-Portrait Project, an ironic look at the notion that the self-portrait (or any portrtait, for that matter) is somehow revelatory of the ‘essence’ of the sitter. ‘…the more I looked at the question of aesthetics the more I doubted whether there was any sense in the concept of self, personality, identity, individual, etc. If one had been born ten minutes earlier and a hundred yards further down the road, what would that entail for the idea of one’s self rattling like a marble inside the six walls of being? – the notion that there was some unique, specific ‘youness’ that occupied some part either of your actual corpse or its immediate vicinity …very conventional schmilosophical humbug.’ Although self-portraits had always figured in the artist’s output – ‘…you’re your own best model: you’re always going to be there, you’re not going to let yourself down, you’re going to hold still for as long as you want…’ – the 1978 Project was the painter’s fullest working through of the theme. ‘I wondered what it would be like just to paint myself; to paint what I saw in the mirror repetitively. Well, within half a sitting I became aware that all I was doing was painting a picture of a mirror; there just happened to be something there reflected in the mirror.’

Nevertheless, the collected self-portraits represent a distributed ‘project’ that allows us to witness Lenkiewicz recording the passing of time in his own life; from the open gaze of a fifteen year old in Cricklewood to the harrowing image painted shortly before his death in Plymouth at age sixty. Or, as Lenkiewicz might have preferred, they constitute a 45-year study of the mirror as still-life.

For a biographical introduction to Lenkiewicz see The Lenkiewicz Book Project (www.robertlenkiewicz.org).

Illustrations:

Self-Portrait with ‘Punch’ Magazine. 1958 188 x 64 cm. Oil on canvas.

Self-Portrait. 1978 40 x 28 cm. Cryla on board. Project – Self-Portrait

The Painter Holding Himself When Ninety. 1978 145 x 99 cm. Emulsion on canvas. Project – Self-Portrait

The Painter with Mary in Newspaper Magi-Fools Hats. 1981 48 x 69 cm. Oil on canvas. Project – The Painter with Mary: a Study in Obsessional Behaviour

Robert Lenkiewicz was born in London in 1941, the son of refugees who ran a Jewish hotel in Fordwych Road, whose elderly residents included a number of survivors of the Nazi horror. He was inspired to paint after seeing Charles Laughton play Rembrandt in Alexander Korda’s biopic. At sixteen Lenkiewicz was accepted at St. Martin’s College of Art & Design and later attended the Royal Academy. However, he was largely self-taught and virtually impervious to contemporary art fashions. Inspired by the example of Albert Schweitzer, Lenkiewicz threw open the doors of his studios to anyone in need of a roof – down and outs, addicts, criminals and the mentally ill congregated there. These individuals were the subjects of his paintings as a young man.

However, such colourful characters were not welcomed by his neighbours and he was obliged to leave London in 1964. He spent a year living in a remote cottage near Lanreath in Cornwall, supporting his young family by teaching, before being offered studio space in Plymouth. The artist’s home and studios once more became a magnet for vagrants and street alcoholics who then sat for paintings. Their numbers swelled and Lenkiewicz was forced to commandeer derelict warehouses in the city to house the ‘dossers’. One of these warehouses also served as a studio and in 1973 became the exhibition space for the Vagrancy Project.

The Vagrancy Project consisted in hundreds of paintings of the dossers and a large book of notes written by the dossers themselves and those involved in their ‘care’ and control. Lenkiewicz hoped that the exhibition, and the down and outs’ own stories, would illuminate the plight of these ‘invisible people’ and galvanize the community into humane action on their behalf.The format of the ‘Project’ – combining thematically linked paintings with the publication of research notes and the collected observations of the sitters – was to be used consistently throughout Lenkiewicz’s career. Projects such as Mental Handicap (1976), Old Age (1979) and Death (1982) followed the one on vagrancy as Lenkiewicz continued to examine the lives of ostracized, hidden sections of the community and bring them to the attention of the general public.

In a parallel line of inquiry, Lenkiewicz also investigated some of society’s most persistent taboos in Projects such as Jealousy (1977), Orgasm (1978), Suicide (1980) and Sexual Behaviour (1983). Here, Lenkiewicz often adopted an allegorical pictorial style to portray human physiology in extremis. Lenkiewicz came to the conclusion that the kinds of sensations people felt when a lover abandoned them or when their cherished beliefs were threatened were identical in kind to the ‘withdrawal symptoms’ and anxieties experienced by addicts or alcoholics over their preferred narcotic. These Projects thus became an extended study in ‘addictive behaviour’ (the title of his 20th and final, unfinished, Project). The conclusions drawn from his own observations were supported by his ever-expanding private library, which contained large sections on philosophy, theology, fascism, anti-Semitism, the witchcraft phenomenon and the occult, which he viewed as a history of ‘fanatical belief systems’. Lenkiewicz contended that in the absence of any good reasons for our beliefs or emotions we must always look to human physiology for an explanation of fanatical or obsessive behaviour and that it is there that we shall discover the roots of fascism – the tendency to treat another person as property.

The perennial outsider, Lenkiewicz’s remarkable body of work enjoyed some recognition by the establishment in later life. He received a major Retrospective in 1997 at Plymouth City Museum, attended by 42,000 visitors. Since his death at the age of 60 on 5 August 2002, examples of his best paintings have fetched ever-rising prices in London auction rooms. In his obiturary of Lenkiewicz, art critic David Lee observed: “Robert’s greatest gift was to show us that an artist could be genuinely concerned about social and domestic issues and attempt the difficult task of expressing this conscience through the deeply unfashionable medium of figurative painting. In that sense he was one of few serious painters of contemporary history.”