Robert Lenkiewicz
'[3] He produced as many as 10,000 works (though this figure includes his prolific output as a pencil portrait artist),[4] often on a large scale, and in themed 'projects' investigating hidden communities (Vagrancy 1973, Mental Handicap 1976) or difficult social issues (Suicide 1980, Death 1982).
[3] When Lenkiewicz died in 2002, he left behind a particularly macabre legacy as the embalmed body of one of his friends, a tramp named Diogenes, was found in the cupboard section at the bottom of a bookcase.
The artist's voluminous diaries, illustrated notebooks and relationship journals are in the Foundation's collection, which was shown at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in 2009.
[6] The Foundation has curated a number of posthumous exhibitions: Self-Portraits 1956-2002 at the Ben Uri Gallery, Jewish Museum of Art in London in 2008; Lenkiewicz: The Legacy – Works from The Lenkiewicz Foundation Collection at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in 2009; Still Lives at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol in 2011; Death and the Maiden at Torre Abbey, in Torquay later that year; and Human, All Too Human at the Royal William Yard in the artist's adopted city of Plymouth in 2012.
[7] Lenkiewicz frequently stated in interview that the hotel's elderly residents included Holocaust survivors but this is contradicted by the artist's brother John, who recollects that the residents tended to be the parents or grandparents of 2nd or 3rd generation English Jews (for instance, the mother of popular entertainer Dickie Valentine), though the hotel's Czechoslovakian cook, Mrs Bobek, was a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
[2] 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.
[1] He spent a year living in a remote cottage near Lanreath in Cornwall, supporting his young family by teaching, before being offered studio space on the Barbican in Plymouth by local artist and businessman John Nash.
In his obituary 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.
Lenkiewicz's pupils include Piran Bishop, Yana Travail, Dan Wheatley, Louise Courtnell, Lisa Stokes, Nahem Shoa, James Guy Eccleston and Joe Stoneman.
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 ostracised, hidden sections of the community and bring them to the attention of the general public.
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.
On and off, for nearly 30 years, he worked on his masterpiece, the Riddle Mural in the Round Room at Port Eliot house, home of the Earl of St. Germans, but died before its completion.
Over forty years Lenkiewicz built up a library of some 25,000 volumes[13] devoted to art, the occult sciences, demonolatry, magic, philosophy, especially metaphysics, alchemy, death, psychology and sexuality, preoccupations which surface in some of his paintings.
