Plymouth College of Art Library presented with copies of the latest Lenkiewicz Biography
Catherine Gillen, director of The Brownston Gallery, is one of the Trustees of The Lenkiewicz Foundation and some four years ago they started the process of authorizing a biography of Robert Lenkiewicz’s life. The first volume has just been published and is already getting good reviews. Written by author and art historian Dr Mark Price it is a definitive, scholarly piece of work that illuminates the many aspects of Lenkiewicz’s life and way of thinking. The gallery works closely with Plymouth College of Art so it seemed appropriate that Catherine presented the copies of the biography to Head of Library Services, Donna Gundry.
“We are delighted to have the new biography of Robert Lenkiewicz in the Library and, as he is such a well-known Plymouth artist, we are sure it will be a great hit with our students. The Robert Lenkiewicz Collection has over 3,000 Art books which were part of Lenkiewicz’s private collection and which were kindly donated to Plymouth College of Art by The Lenkiewicz Foundation in 2018. Our students find the collection highly informative and inspirational for their practice, the collection is a wonderful resource for our students.“ Donna Gundry, Head of Library Services, Plymouth College of Art.
Robert Lenkiewicz sought the total fusion of life and art. Determined to make every day ‘an experiment in living’, he became notorious for his complex love life, faking his own death, and embalming the corpse of his regular model, the vagrant ‘Diogenes’ (Edwin Mackenzie). In a series of immense projects spanning forty years, Lenkiewicz combined visual art, philosophy, and social activism to illuminate the lives of those he called ‘society’s invisible people’.
Born in war-torn London to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Lenkiewicz moved to Plymouth in 1969 where he kept an open studio with an ‘all are welcome’ policy. His vast Barbican mural soon became one of the city’s best known and most popular landmarks. Largely ignored by the art establishment, he created his own audience of ordinary people who would never normally set foot in an art gallery or museum. His work nevertheless confronted the most serious of themes: vagrancy, mental handicap, old age, suicide, addiction, love, and death – often with wry, mischievous humour.
This first volume of Mark D. Price’s two-part biography distills the contents of Lenkiewicz’s previously unseen private notebooks, diaries, and correspondence, and includes over a hundred interviews with partners, models, closest companions, family, friends, and children. The book tells the full story of Lenkiewicz’s controversial life and philosophy, as well as his paintings and thought-provoking projects.
