Robert Lenkiewicz

A few days ago in The Independent there was a profile of Robert Lenkiewicz, painter, showman, artistic musketeer, lothario (see above), and eccentric, who died six years ago leaving a mountain of unsettled debts. There were 240 claimants to his estate. Most of these claims have been met by selling off his paintings and his collection of rare books, but it's the record prices for his paintings that sparked the article.

They're newsworthy because he was not, and is not, seen as a cutting-edge contemporary artist. Instead his work was shunned by what you could call 'the contemporary art world' yet embraced by 'the public', in the way that Jack Vettriano's work is. Though their work is quite different - even if Tom Lubbock more or less lumps the two together at the end of this piece (along with Beryl Cook). More on this further down.

Robert Lenkiewicz is someone I was planning to write about in the chapter on eccentric artists (towards the end of In Search of the English Eccentric). I went for Sebastian Horsley instead, and then wrote in a general sense about how the modern artist has been perceived over the last 500 years. All of a sudden I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do.

Lenkiewicz would have been fun to write about, mainly because he falls outside the accepted caricature of the aristocratic, anachronistic eccentric toff who lives in cheery isolation somewhere in the English countryside, also because there are some great stories associated with him. But, if I'm entirely honest, and after starting a sentence like that I kind of have to be, I didn't want to write about him because I used to work for his son at his gallery. He's called Wolfe. I know one of his daughters too, and I guess the idea of writing about their father with any kind of authority felt unnatural. I couldn't see a way of describing him that would allow both of them to recognise him. But that's an aside. Again. At times this entire blog feels like an aside. Much more interesting is Wolfe talking about what it was to be a teenager growing up around his dad.

He told me once about a tramp called Andy Lynch who had been taken in by his father. One night Andy drank a titanic quantity of meths, climbed to the top of the building where they lived and began to piss onto the street below. Mid-piss he set fire to the stream of urine issuing forth before jumping, ablaze, to his death. Wolfe was about 16 at the time. His father wanted him to know death, to understand something of its smell and what it looked like so he took him and his brother Ruben to the morgue. There they found Andy's corpse. He told his sons to sit with it for fifteen minutes. Wolfe went to feel the texture of the charred flesh but pushed too hard and broke the blackened surface. From the way Wolfe described it, it had the consistency of a crème brûlé pudding. On the way out, with a rare kind of forcefulness, Robert insisted that they look into the other cubicles in the morgue. He wanted to show them more bodies and more death. So they did, like negatives exposed to the non-light that was, here, death.

Wolfe's an artist now. Here's a low-lit image of one of the three big pieces from his last exhibition, at Dickinson's on Jermyn Street.








There's one more thing to say about the way Robert Lenkiewicz was described in this article, and it's to do with how we configure art and artists.

Although he is lumped together with artists who produce kitsch and unchallenging work, Lenkiewicz's output is different to that of Jack Vettriano or Beryl Cook. Because of its inconsistency. That and its ambition. There are occasions when he achieves the clarity and quality of mark, intent, visual impact and the kind of compositional harmony that he undoubtedly aspired to. Yet there are thousands of times when he does not - the works he did in a hurry, to pay a bill, get out of there, pass the time, or just feed the part of him that needed to be prolific. Towards the end of his life he rarely struggled to push each painting as far as it could possibly go, more often leaving the paint thin and light.

When talking about art, a lot of the time you end up talking about movements or artists - though more often it's artists. When talking about artists you end up referring to the work they have produced. Their character, eccentric or not, with time becomes less important than the works that have survived them. And it's at this point, for the sake of concision, when describing an artistic oeuvre in your mind you flatten the images that you can associate easily with the artist, until they form a single generic image. Your response to that image controls your reaction to that artist. The artist becomes a discrete productive entity: a kind of machine there to produce 'arts'. It makes it easier to say yes or no to, say, Klee art, Kippenberger art, Kosuth art. So when Lubbock sets out a mini-hierarchy of figurative painters (a bit like a school sports day with coloured rosettes, trophies and plaques) he's cementing that.

I suppose the thing that interests me here is that (as with someone like Giorgione) the artist-machine is rarely judged according to how many 'arts' it produces. Our minds can't easily concertina a thousand images into one.

But don't bother telling this to a freakishly prolific artist. The drive to create on this scale doesn't stem from a reasoned intellectual decision; it comes from somewhere lower down.