Robert Lenkiewicz - The Painter with Women

The first paintings in the ‘Double’ series in Lenkiewicz’ studio in 1988 show (left to right): The Painter with … Janine Pecorini, Karen and Thaïs, Patti Avery.

Lenkiewicz in conversation with his model, Yana Trevail, during a sitting for a ‘double’ or doppelgänger theme portrait, 1988. Photo : Bjorn Grage.

When Benedikte cancelled a late night sitting at short notice, Lenkiewicz was infuriated. ‘I rage that mediocrity can look so beautiful’, he wrote in frustration, striking through his diary appointment which served to remind him: ‘Have large canvasses ready and mirror. Work hard – hard – hard – intense – intense.’

Instead of allowing ‘all that work and build-up to tonight’s painting’ to go to waste, he sat and ‘thought much in the library’. He decided to set up a canvas nevertheless, collected Karen Ciambriello and their newly born daughter, Thaïs, from their nearby home on the Barbican and recorded that:

Did full-size tonal study of the three of us – ‘Double theme’. Rich image – strangest of the three pieces so far. Much thought on enraging Project on the theme of ‘The Painter and Women’.

He was soon discussing a preview of the Project he was now calling The Painter with Women: Observations on the Theme of the Double , which would take place in New Street over the Christmas and New Year of 1988–89. Another more practical motivation was to resolve some of his perennial financial problems, as, to make matters worse, the Education Project had proved predictably uncommercial.

Double portrait of Yana Trevail shown at the New Street Gallery, 1988.

With the exhibition in mind, the pace of work rapidly increased. On 9 July, he noted, ‘Megan sits for erotica study. Work on Double theme.’ Then the following day, ‘Lindsay – Work hard on Double study. She was heroic – worked hard until early hours – Reasonable piece.’

By the time Stokes returned to Lenkiewicz’s studio in September, he was able to report:

He mentioned that the public attendance at the Education exhibition had now fallen low enough for him to think of closing it, and turn to concentrate on the small exhibition of doubles at the New Street Gallery … Robert led me into the bedroom, where there are a number of paintings of himself with various nude women, and one including Karen and Robert’s new daughter. Robert said Karen did not want him to use it, because of the possibilities of what might happen in the current moral climate … I was interested to see that as they now stand, the paintings will have a uniformly dark background.

On this visit, Stokes also photographed Lenkiewicz in his library, holding Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting , revealing the artist’s growing interest in the concerns of postmodern philosophy, confirmed in the artist’s own diary:

Have now gone through thirty-one Wittgenstein books and eleven Derrida’s; and not seriously, credibly any the wiser. So very suspicious of any non-physiology based philosophy – though I love it. But then of course it must be all physiologically-based?

Rather than continuing to pursue his documentation of other people’s lives in his sociologically based Projects, Lenkiewicz was fixed on returning to a further ruthless analysis of his own relationships. Having recorded in minute detail his own aesthetic responses some ten years previously in the Mary: Aesthetic Notes large folio, it now occurred to Lenkiewicz that he could gather further evidence of his theory as to the physiological base of human behaviour from his partners. Stokes remarked:

Speaking about his relations with various of the subjects, Robert told me that he is now asking them to write down their experiences separately, and without reference to his own writings; indeed, preferably in ignorance of them. He brought out a box containing files of this material, and showed me examples, some of which so closely resemble his own work as to look like deliberate emulations.

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