Artist who made the invisible visible
Mark Price explores the life of the late artist Robert Lenkiewicz in a new biography
MANY older Plymothians will recall Robert Lenkiewicz’s giant presence on The Barbican – invariably dressed in his paint-splattered smock and red scarf, with wild hair and carrying an armful of books.
His life was as magnificently theatrical as his vast Elizabethan mural which adorned the wall next to his studio on the Parade.
I had the good fortune of being asked by The Lenkiewicz Foundation to make sense of that life in order to write his first biography.
It proved to be a daunting task, taking me more than four years, and involving hundreds of interviews with his family and friends, and many sleepless nights, hunched over his previously unseen archive of private notebooks and diaries.
As his 2002 obituary published in The Independent had stated: “The history of Lenkiewicz is also the history of Plymouth in the second half of the 20th century.” To tell his story, I inevitably had to tell a good deal about the life of the city.
Robert came to Plymouth in the mid-1960s and, after that, seldom left for more than a few days at a time. Plymouth was not merely a backdrop to his life – it was the air he breathed, the water he had to swim – or sink – in. Often it was very rough, cold, and murky water. In his early years in the city, he became a kind of freelance social worker, supporting large numbers of downand-outs, addicts and alcoholics.
He gatecrashed empty warehouses and turned them into emergency housing centres.
His open studios attracted all of human life, especially those on the fringes of society.
This first
volume of a two-volume biography is accordingly titled ‘All Are Welcome’. It is due out this week.
Robert painted the vagrants’ portraits, recorded their stories, and often fed them – when he could afford to. The under-belly of Plymouth became his subject matter. Deaths,
murders or suicides, whenever the police found an unidentified body in an alleyway or under a car, Robert was often their first port of call for identification.
The authorities disliked him at first, to say the least. Via largescale ‘Projects’ (themed series of paintings on Vagrancy, Mental Handicap, Old Age, Sexual Behaviour, etc), he made these invisible people visible, drawing attention to civic failure, exhibiting all that the ‘decent political classes’ wanted to keep undercover. Plymouth was very strait-laced, white, and religious in the 1970s; caught, as he said, “between Wesley and the Dockyard”. The official attitude to Robert’s work was: “Addiction? Homelessness? Mental Illness? Sexual deviance? No, we don’t have any of that here.”
The fishermen, locals and shopkeepers on the Barbican were less hypocritical. There is a deeply piratical tradition in the old parts of Plymouth, almost to the extent that, if the authorities don’t like you, you’re probably doing something right.
Whether the residents of the Barbican understood Robert’s philosophy or not, they generally supported him, and admired the good humour with which he carried it all out.
His daughter Alice’s fine book ‘Memories of My Father’ describes the anarchic but mainly joyful feel of the Barbican in the 1970s when the entire community (many of whom modelled for him) became involved with Robert’s Elizabethan mural. As one of the residents remarked to Robert: “Don’t pretend you’re all cosmopolitan, you’re one of us now!”
Somehow Robert always managed to be both. With typical wit one April Fools’ Day, he whitewashed over his large mural overnight with three flying ducks and took a straw poll as to which version the public liked best.
In later years, his Retrospective exhibition in 1997 at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery attracted more visitors than any previous exhibition there. However, it wasn’t only a local audience which was fascinated by him. A large-scale exhibition at Birmingham’s International Convention Centre in 1994 attracted over 30,000 people in just one week.
This biography records the artist’s life from his childhood in London, as the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, to his years in Plymouth, including such notorious incidents as the faking of his own death, the struggle with the authorities over the embalmed corpse of his vagrant friend ‘Diogenes’ (Edwin Mackenzie), and regular accusations of blasphemy and obscenity. It also describes the arcane world of Robert’s research into alchemy and mysticism, gradually building the finest private library of works on witchcraft and demonology in the UK. When his paintings finally started to earn money, he gifted large amounts with no publicity to mental health organisations, rape crisis centres and other charities.
When he died, he had no cash, though his estate was valued in excess of £3m. Claims amounted to over £1m, while legal and admin costs were over £2m.
Until now, no one has highlighted the huge philosophical importance of his life and work. The book details his artistic and intellectual development, as well as his many complex personal relationships in the context of half a century of political intrigues, crimes, loves, and community breakdown. It reveals how his work is now more relevant than ever.
What is it, Lenkiewicz wanted to know, that makes people willing to kill or die for a fanatical belief or point of view? He still has important things to say to us. Being dead never stopped him in the past.