Self Portraits: 1956 - 2002
Ben Uri Gallery
26 September - 14 December 2008

Illustrated: Self-Portrait. 1978.

TLF have published a 'walkthrough' of the Ben Uri Gallery on their Acrobat.com homepage. Click here to view the walkthrough as an online PDF document.

The first major London exhibition of works by Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002) at Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, featuring a selection from the artist's finest self-portrature throughout his career.

For an artist first inspired to paint in boyhood after seeing Charles Laughton portray Rembrandt in Alexander Korda's classic film, it was perhaps inevitable that Robert Lenkiewicz would turn frequently to the subject of self-portraiture.

The self-portraits collected in this show span the artist's whole career. From his first paintings as an earnest fifteen-year-old boy, working in Room No. 3 of the Hotel Shemtov, the Jewish hotel run by his parents in Cricklewood in the post-war years, to the haunting last self-portrait in hospital shortly before his death in Plymouth aged sixty, these images make for an encyclopaedia of the artist's changing styles and philosophical interests down the years.

Lenkiewicz famously chose the outsider as the subject for his art: the vagrants and street alcoholics who dossed at his studios, families with mentally handicapped children, the elderly, the dying - human beings isolated from one another by their circumstances and from themselves by their preoccupations. 'You're born alone and you die alone,' he said and the problem was to deal with the isolation of simply being alive. Lenkiewicz found one solution - a richly creative life conducted with remarkable panache - and left behind a legacy which will appeal to anyone with an interest in the conundrum of existence.

'Skill is a faculty that is half-asleep,' said Lenkiewicz, yet his self-portraits transcend mere technique and confront the spectator with the fully alert and unflinching gaze of an artist profoundly interested in 'the business of living'.

Ben Uri Study Day
National Portrait Gallery
6 November 2008

Illustrated: Man Watching Woman Walk Away (detail), 1977

Action at a distance: Magic, power and control in pre-modern Europe.

Speaker: Dr Stephen Clucas, editor of Intellectual History Review and Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History at Birkbeck.

This talk enters into dialogue with three of the obsessions pursued in the painting, book collecting and notebook researches of Robert Lenkiewicz: the practice of 'occult philosophy' or 'magic' in the Renaissance, political domination and the power relations involved in romantic attachment and sexual partnerships. By examining the kinds of power sought by mediaeval and Renaissance magicians (and their proscription by their demonological contemporaries) and by reflecting on the analogies magical practitioners drew between the power of love and the power of magic, I hope to come to some surprising conclusions about the psychological origins of modern political power.

Ben Uri Study Day
National Portrait Gallery
6 November 2008

Illustrated: Detail of The Barbican Mural, 1972.

Creation, Illumination and Transmutation: Robert Lenkiewicz, the Science of Kabbalah and the Art of Alchemy.

Speaker: Dr Peter J. Forshaw, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English and the Humanities, Birkbeck.

Inspired by the incredible collection of occult books and manuscripts collected by Robert Lenkiewicz, this talk shall use his Notes on the Barbican Mural (1972) as the starting point for a discussion of some of the significant figures Lenkiewicz included in this work. Given the mural's subtitle, The Influence of Jewish Thought on Elizabethan Culture 1580-1620, it seems appropriate to begin with an introduction to Kabbalistic works that formed an important part of his occult collection and then consider how these ideas connected with another of Robert's intellectual passions, the transformative art of alchemy.

Ben Uri Study Day
National Portrait Gallery
6 November 2008

A Necessary Madness: Love as a mental illness.

Speaker: Dr Frank Tallis

Read the lecture online here.

For thousands of years, both doctors and poets have espoused the belief that falling in love and mental illness are close cousins - sharing a number of common 'symptoms'. Recent advances in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience are consistent with this view. Scientific findings are discussed in the context of Robert Lenkiewicz's speculations on the 'physiological' nature of romantic love.

Dr Frank Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist and a former lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry and King's College, London. His popular non-fiction works include 'Love Sick' and 'Understanding Obsessions and Compulsions'.

Symposium
University of Glasgow, Senate Room
23 September 2008

No Graven Image: The Life, Work and Ideas of Robert Lenkiewicz.

Speaker: Francis Mallett

Part of a symposium hosted by the University of Glasgow, Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, called: 'Art, Religion, Identity'.

Born during the war, the son of Jewish emigres fleeing Nazi persecution, Robert Lenkiewicz grew up in north London in his parents' home for the elderly and infirm, the Hotel Shem-Tov. The residents were his first subject matter, despite the religious law which stated "thou shalt make no graven image". Lenkiewicz drew and painted obsessively from an early age, attending St. Martin's and the Royal Academy colleges. The perennial outsider himself, Lenkiewicz was consciously out of step with contemporary art movements. His fascination with society's dispossessed led him to work on large-scale series of paintings on social themes. The first project on Vagrancy recorded the lives of the down-and-outs: 'invisible people' as Lenkiewicz called them. Later themes covered Old Age, Suicide and Death. A thinker steeped in the history European philosophy, particularly Nietzsche, Lenkiewicz questioned the belief that society 'cared' about its own victims. Then he took this a radical step further, analysing his own feelings about personal relationships in projects on Love and Romance, Jealousy, Orgasm and The Painter with Women. His challenging conclusion, that all human behaviour is physiologically and aesthetically driven, rather than psychologically or morally, was termed by Lenkiewicz "aesthetic fascism". This paper traces the artist's artistic and philosophical development and links this to his early life and background. (From the symposium abstract).

This event was supported by the Ben Uri Gallery: The London Jewish Museum of Art.

Programme can be downloaded here.