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The World of Robert Lenkiewicz ‘The Bloody Chamber’

‘You must realise that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.’

Angela Carter

I first walked into Robert Lenkiewicz’s studio on the Barbican in late September 1990. I had no idea what to expect. I had never heard of him and only went in because a friend and I had bumped into some other friends who had just been there. It was one of those places which immediately made you feel as if you had come to the wrong place, as though you had intruded into some private, other world. The contrast between the outside where everyday life was happening and this dark, cavernous interior made a strong impression.

There were what seemed like hundreds of paintings all piled on top of each other, from floor to ceiling, predominantly of women, or so it seemed at the time. My friend and I crept around the edges of the studio not really knowing what to look at first. I was distracted by a conversation that was happening in the centre of the room between a woman and two men. She was telling them that the painter had said he was willing to paint her but she would have to pose naked from the waist up, sitting on his lap. They were speaking in hushed, reverential tones and I remember thinking, ‘How naïve can they be – can’t they see what’s going on here?’ There was something clichéd about the whole scenario; if you were to ask anyone to describe the studio of a typical ‘bohemian’ painter, I was willing to bet that a high percentage would come up with the scene that was playing out in front of me.

Of course, a month later I was sitting on Robert’s lap, naked from the waist up, posing for him. One of the things I soon learned from Robert’s world was that things were almost never what you expected them to be.

It was, and continues to be, too easy to judge Robert’s paintings on the ‘evidence’ of his biography, and The Painter with Women Project is a particular casualty of this. When faced with a painting of Robert and a nude or semi-nude model, it is easy to see it as the slightly boastful representation of the painter with lover, so that when the Project is seen as a whole, it inevitably follows that it must be the proof of a long list of Robert’s lovers.

In the months before first visiting the Barbican studio I had been reading The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, a collection of re-imaginings of traditional fairytales, told from a feminist perspective. The stories are violent, erotic and disturbing. Angela Carter used them to subvert the old familiar fairytale archetypes and create new and fresh meanings. One of the stories, The Erl-King, resonated very strongly with me when I walked around the studio for the first few times. According to the traditional tale, the Erl-King’s daughter was a malevolent spirit who lived in the forest preying on travellers who were lost. In Carter’s version, it is the Erl-King himself who lures women to his hut, seduces them and turns them into birds. The walls of his forest home are built from the cages of all of the birds he holds captive. One woman though understands what is at risk; she seduces him and makes a plait from his own hair with which to strangle him. A happy ending, but complicated by the fact that she listens to his stories, finds him enchanting, interesting and beautiful, but always with the knowledge that he will reduce her to something less than she is. Robert knew the traditional story and read to me the well-known version by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), put to music by Franz Schubert in 1824, but was amused by my interpretation of it as it related to his studio.

When I began sitting for Robert and spending more time at the studio, I became much more familiar with the paintings and with what Robert was trying to achieve with Project 18 (The Painter with Women). I found the whole thing troubling as I couldn’t really differentiate between the judgement I had made on my first visit and the ‘reality’ of the paintings as they appeared in increasing numbers as the months went on. It was only after quite some time and having been immersed in the work that I began to see how Robert was intentionally trying to disrupt traditional visual meanings, and the more paintings there were, the more disturbing they seemed. The vivid colours, dramatic lighting, awkward poses, strange compositions, all contributed to a hallucinatory experience which emphasised this idea of the impossibility of seeing the ‘other’ person in front of you. All you could ever hope to see was the representation or manifestation of a collection of expectations, presumptions, hopes and fears; your own fabrications reflected back at you as if by looking in a mirror. His idea was that the ‘other’ didn’t in fact exist, or at the very least they ceased to exist the minute you became involved with them. And the process of sitting for paintings merely reinforced this.

It is an odd experience to allow yourself to be observed in such a passive way by someone else; it is very far from everyday behaviour to sit for a painting in the modern world. My first sitting for Robert was awkward and uncomfortable only for the first few minutes, until he started talking and asking me about, well, about everyday nonsense really. I can remember thinking how peculiar it was that on the inside I was panicking but simultaneously behaving as though this kind of thing happened every day. What I understood was that, in a way, Robert was using me as material to explore something else; that the painting wasn’t really about me at all and as soon as I understood that I stopped worrying about it. It was equally clear that he was using himself at least as much as he was using his sitters; some of whom were friends or acquaintances, and many, of course, were lovers. But the point was always that it didn’t matter who they were as individuals, the creatures in the paintings (including Robert) were ciphers through which an altogether different set of ideas were being explored. He often said that he used himself and others as guinea pigs in an experiment to try to understand the nature of relationships, to look at the ‘falling in love scenario’ and to test his theory that all behaviour had a physiological rather than a psychological basis. His relationships with women were the laboratory for this research, and I know how cold that sounds and I know how peculiar it was but I also know how strangely honest it was. There were few real illusions about Robert’s life, only what Angela Carter would call the ‘consolatory nonsenses’ that allowed everyday interactions to occur with the least amount of discord.

What was most surprising, when The Painter with Women Project was first exhibited in Birmingham in early 1994, was that there still seemed to be a general misconception about the paintings. When seen en masse, I found it impossible to see them as titillating or sexually provocative; rather they were provocative in the truest sense. They were disturbing and discomfiting, creating a genuine sense of unease which placed them firmly outside traditional portraiture and even more firmly beyond a simple biographical interpretation. I’m not sure if the presentation of the exhibition as spectacle somehow sidestepped the bigger issues, in the same way as the drama of the studio interior on the Barbican made it impossible to engage with anything other than the spectacle of a ‘studio’. The paintings need to be seen together, in an environment which allows them space to breathe. It’s only then, I believe, that Project 18 should be judged.

Anna Navas, 2011

Detail, including self-portrait, from the diptych, The Burial of Education, the centrepiece of the 1988 Education Project.