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 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.