R.O. Lenkiewicz: 'The Painter with Women' - the Evolution of a Project

'The Painter with Women - the evolution of a Project' is the first publication about the artist Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002) which draws upon his private journals and notebooks to give an insight into the painter's motivations and working practices in what is probably the artist's most misunderstood investigation of human relationships.

What emerges is a picture of the artist at variance with the ironic, urbane persona which Lenkiewicz presented to the world - here at last is a glimpse into the passion, and sometimes rage, which drives the creative process.

Though 'The Painter with Women' would become his most popular Project in many quarters, its complex themes tended to be passed over as fans seized upon the decorative aspects of Lenkiewicz's virtuoso painting of fabric and skin tones and critics dismissed the whole enterprise as a catalogue of a promiscuous lifestyle.

This book takes an honest look at the imagery of the Project and the motivations behind it and aims to draw out the visual ironies which Lenkiewicz was striving for, which in many cases were a deliberate ravishment of the eye designed to provoke reflection on the viewer's part upon their own responses to 'seduction' - both personal and artistic. The book also brings back into view the uncanny sub-text of the Project's subtitle, 'Observations on the Theme of the Double', where mirror reflections of model and artist alike dissolve fixed identity and presence.

Above all, it is the artist's own words, from diaries and notebooks, which show a side of Lenkiewicz which has seldom been glimpsed - a man on creative fire at the height of his artistic power, driving himself beyond reason to construct the vast edifice of a Project which his serious heart condition seemed to indicate would be his last.

After a colourful life surrounded by controversy,
Robert Oscar Lenkiewicz died prematurely in 2002 at
the age of sixty. Through public gallery exhibitions at
London's Ben Uri Jewish Museum of Art in 1998 and
more recently the Royal West of England Academy in
Bristol, Lenkiewicz is now gaining overdue recognition
as one of this country's most significant post-war
figurative painters. Unfashionable in the art world of
his time, his work communicates directly with people
about their own lives and the world they live in.

In January 1994, Lenkiewicz's eighteenth `Project' 'The Painter with Women' was exhibited at Birmingham's International Convention Centre. Organised by the Halcyon Gallery, the exhibition attracted over 30,000 visitors in only eight days. It was highly unusual for Lenkiewicz to agree to show his work outside of his own premises on Plymouth's Barbican but the aim was to raise enough money to purchase the large warehouse studio and to turn it into a permanent gallery and library dedicated to the study of the sociological and philosophical concerns of his previous Projects, and to the further `provocation of thought'.

His most recent large-scale Project, called 'Observations on Local Education', Lenkiewicz had described as the most depressing he had worked on, in spite of other earlier challenging themes such as 'Vagrancy', 'Mental Handicap', 'Old Age' and 'Death'. He became equally despondent with
its apathetic reception from public and critics alike, although this was nothing new for Lenkiewicz, whose career had been marked by his refusal to conform to the art establishment or the public taste. Nevertheless, he was minded to embark on a new Project, one both self-reflective and intentionally provocative.

Subtitled `Observations of the Theme of the Double', Lenkiewicz's subsequent Project 'The Painter with Women' returned to the analysis of human relationships which had been the focus of previous themes such as 'Love and Romance', 'Jealousy' and 'The Painter with Mary: A Study in Obsessional Behaviour'. As ever painted from life, Lenkiewicz mainly portrayed himself as the central character in a series of paintings with female models. Like all self-portraits, they were in Lenkiewicz's words `merely a painting of a mirror'. He compared relationships to the myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection yet mistakes it for another person, concluding that the `loved one' was merely our own double.

Of all Lenkiewicz's Projects, 'The Painter with Women' was arguably the longest in the making, and during those six years it underwent significant development. This book charts that evolution through the artist's own extensive diaries and other first-hand material, in particular the photographs and diaries of his friend, the photographer Dr Philip Stokes.

The original theme of `The Double', which harked back to earlier ideas about relationships, soon took on new dimensions with Lenkiewicz's adoption of classical allegories, in particular, that of the monastic St Anthony of Egypt. His research into the St Anthony theme took him from Athanasius' Life of Anthony and Grünewald's 'Isenheim Altarpiece' through to more modern interpretations by French writer Gustave Flaubert and, especially, composer Paul Hindemith in his opera 'Mathis der Maler'. As Lenkiewicz's identification with his alter ego of Anthony grew, the sub-text of the Project increasingly became a meditation on the artist's own life.