Fear and Fame : More Issues in Trial Than Abbey’s Destroyed Sculpture

He could step up to a block of wood, chisel and mallet in his bearlike paws, and transform it into something from a dream. Or a nightmare. Those who knew his work called him a modern-day Michelangelo, a sculptor to be reckoned with, admired.

Fame, however, eluded Ted Lukjanczyk. True, the artist’s bronze bust of Pope John Paul II was displayed for a time in the Vatican library. But mostly, Lukjanczyk toiled in anonymity, pounding out creations with relentless precision for wages that hardly paid the bills.

So it was that Lukjanczyk (pronounced luke-JAN-sick) drifted back last year to the Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery atop a shrub-studded hillside in Oceanside. There, he undertook what some predicted would be his masterpiece--a larger-than-life rendering of Christ on the cross.

The hours gave way to weeks and then months as Lukjanczyk worked at the abbey, shaping the stubborn mahogany into form. By October, the 53-year-old sculptor had nearly completed the piece.

Then he destroyed it.

Hefting a five-gallon can of gasoline, Lukjanczyk drenched the workshop where the sculpture lay and ignited it with a cigarette lighter. Flames lit the night sky.

The next morning, as the ruins of the workshop still smoldered, Lukjanczyk took aim at a new target. Wielding a cross crafted of ebony, the artist struck out at another of his works, a graceful carving of St. Benedict on display in the abbey’s entryway. When he was done, the arms were lopped off.

Lukjanczyk fled in his pickup truck, but police caught up with him a day later. He confessed to officers on the spot and was jailed.

In the fire’s aftermath, the Benedictine monks who had befriended

Lukjanczyk searched their souls for explanations. More than one concluded that the desecrations could only be the work of a madman.

But for Lukjanczyk, the events of Oct. 2 had a perfect logic. A life of frustration, of fleeting fame, of fears his talent was being exploited had given way to a desperate, improbable act. As the sculptor saw it, the destruction of his work was a symbol, the culmination of a life of tragedy and triumph.

Soon after Lukjanczyk arrived at the County Jail in Vista, he began painting a concrete wall of his cell.

Using a cigarette filter and some mattress thread as brushes and an ingenious mix of Maalox and charcoal as his paint, the artist sketched the portrait of a nude woman reclining beside a grape arbor. Before he could finish, however, his jailers scrubbed the artwork off the wall.

To pass the time since then, Lukjanczyk has written long, rambling letters to friends and acquaintances, maintaining a steady dialogue on his wide-ranging views, from politics to his own plight.

Friends say he is brilliant, charismatic, the type of person who can converse with conviction on nearly any subject. Well-read in the classics, Lukjanczyk speaks five languages. Though he has lived in this country since he moved from Europe with his parents at the age of 16, Lukjanczyk still talks with just the hint of an accent.

But it is the art that speaks for him best. Working primarily in wood, he has completed an impressive number of pieces, many of them massive creations that have been appraised by collectors at prices well in excess of $100,000. They assault the senses, often featuring human figures that flow together to deliver messages that are less than subtle--the plight of the homeless and hungry, man’s inhumanity against man, the widening gap between technology and the human spirit.

“A lot of people laugh at me for saying this, but I would classify him as probably one of the artist geniuses of the 20th Century,” said Roger Williams, a Santa Rosa-based independent art appraiser familiar with Lukjanczyk’s work. “His attention to detail is incredible and everything has a message. But he’s probably not appreciated as much as he should be. Like many artists, his work may not be discovered by the world until after he is dead.”

He is a tall and lanky man, 6-foot-1 at least. Veins run a serpentine path up his sinewy arms, attesting to a lifetime of strenuous wood carving. His face is chiseled, marked by a bushy, black mustache and framed by thick black hair and long sideburns. These days, though, he looks gaunt, almost sickly. But when a smile comes, the worry seems to fade as his small eyes twinkle with the delight of a man who enjoys life.

In an interview at the jail, Lukjanczyk said he is eager for a trial or settlement of his case, eager for his fate to be meted out. The artist said he wants to do his time in state prison--where he would retain some latitude to continue his artistic endeavors--then move from the United States after his release.

Lukjanczyk readily admits he set the fire that destroyed his carving of Christ, as well as others that caused about $150,000 damage to various buildings at the abbey, among them a new, expansive chapel the monks had nearly completed after more than six years of labor.

He also concedes he sent a threatening note to a Vista Superior Court judge. Shortly after he landed in jail, Lukjanczyk says he met a young Vietnamese man who told the artist he was being sent to prison “for joy riding” in a stolen car. Outraged by the youth’s predicament, Lukjanczyk dispatched a letter to Judge Zalman Scherer.

“We the people have passed sentence on you,” it reads. “I have paid $350 for your execution, for you are a pollution, a filth on the white robe of justice.”

Although Lukjanczyk insists the note was a practical joke he hoped would frighten Scherer, authorities have taken it seriously, filing a felony count of threatening a judge. The artist also faces four counts of arson and one of malicious mischief for destroying the statue of St. Benedict. Lukjanczyk has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

In recent weeks, the district attorney has reportedly offered to reduce the charges against Lukjanczyk if he pleads guilty to a single count of arson, a crime that carries a maximum six-year sentence.

“There were a lot of people on the premises who could have gone up with that fire,” said Gary Rempel, the deputy district attorney handling the case. “Because of that, you really have to evaluate the crime. You can forgive an eccentric artist certain things, but that is not a license to endanger other people’s lives.”

Lukjanczyk, meanwhile, has grown impatient with his court-appointed attorney, Lon Hubbard. The artist said he is willing to take the prison sentence, but Hubbard “seems determined” to steer Lukjanczyk into a state mental institution instead. Hubbard said he was doing “an appropriate job” for his client but declined further comment.

Meanwhile, a hearing is scheduled in San Diego Superior Court on Wednesday to determine whether the artist is mentally competent to stand trial.

Court-appointed psychological experts who have examined Lukjanczyk say he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur. That diagnosis infuriates the sculptor. Lukjanczyk acknowledges he has had a history of psychological troubles, but insists he is a manic depressive, a disorder confirmed by doctors more than a decade ago.

Indeed, friends say Lukjanczyk’s life has been an emotional seesaw, a series of amazing escapades. And through it all, his art has been both a blessing and a curse.

He was born Tadeusz Lukjanczyk on Sept. 12, 1933, in Nieswicz, a small village in the Ukraine. His father, Theodor, was a jeweler and watchmaker by trade; his mother, Sophia, a native of Poland.

The family was swept up by World War II. Young Ted was educated in German schools, but by September, 1944, the family was fleeing the advancing Russian drive. Within six months, they again had to pick up and move, hitching on with the troops of a renegade Russian battalion that had deserted the eastern battlefront and was attempting to cross war-torn Germany to surrender to U.S. forces.

In those last months of the war, Lukjanczyk said, his father organized a resistance group to protect the family and others against marauding German troops. As Lukjanczyk tells it, he often served as bait, using his perfect German to lure unsuspecting troops of the Third Reich into a trap laid by his father.

When the war ended, Lukjanczyk and his parents survived for four years in displaced-persons camps. Finally, in March, 1949, the family was able to immigrate to the United States under a program administered by the Catholic Church.

The family settled in Detroit, where Lukjanczyk attended high school. Over the years that followed, Lukjanczyk took a wife and entered the Army.

It was as a private at Ft. Benning, Ga., that Lukjanczyk discovered he could use his boyhood nack for whittling to gain a step up in life. A company commander got wind of Lukjanczyk’s talents and placed him in a cushy position crafting swagger sticks and other works made of wood.

After the Army and two children, the marriage failed and by 1958 he had enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit to study art. By 1962, Lukjanczyk had landed a well-paying job with the General Motors styling division. The future seemed limitless, but little more than a year after he began work for the corporate giant, Lukjanczyk suffered an emotional breakdown and quit his job.

The years that followed were a yo-yo ride of emotions and art. In 1968, his mental state had again so deteriorated that Lukjanczyk checked himself into an institution in Detroit.

There he met a man who told him about Synanon, a West Coast-based drug-treatment facility. By 1969, the artist was a full-time devotee, living on Synanon’s 3,000-acre ranch in Marin County. His relationship with the treatment program would last for the next seven years.

As Lukjanczyk describes it, these were the good years, long before Synanon became a front-page controversy when its founder, Charles E. Dederich, was convicted for his role in a conspiracy to kill a Los Angeles attorney by placing a rattlesnake in his mailbox in 1978.

For Lukjanczyk, Synanon offered an alternate life style, a place away from the maddening swirl of life on the outside. He quickly rose to a position of some prominence in the community, taking care of the center’s fishing fleet and devoting large chunks of time to the pursuit of his artwork.

“Ted, I would have to say kindly, was kind of a pet,” recalled Sam Martin, a longtime friend of Lukjanczyk and former Synanon resident. “Anything that needed to be done that seemed to be impossible, either in an artistic sense or otherwise, the old man (Dederich) would invariably look to Ted for some kind of aesthetic information or ideas.”

By the mid-1970s, however, the artist and his new wife, Patricia, were growing increasingly discontent with their life in Synanon. In particular, they were troubled when the group began purchasing guns and ammunition, ostensibly to protect the community against burglars.

In 1976, they left. But Lukjanczyk’s dealings with Synanon did not stop there. A few months after the couple moved to Los Angeles, the artist was arrested by federal authorities for mailing a bomb threat to Dederich after Synanon refused to release Lukjanczyk’s artwork. Synanon officials did not return telephone calls from The Times.

According to records on file at the U.S. District Court in San Diego, charges against Lukjanczyk were dismissed in September, 1976. Lukjanczyk insists the bomb threat was a hoax designed “to put some fear” into Dederich and get his artwork back. As part of the terms of his release, Lukjanczyk was put under the care of a psychologist with the Veteran’s Administration.

(Later, the artist took a more conservative tack to retrieve his artwork--he filed a lawsuit. By 1982, Synanon had agreed to an out-of-court settlement releasing four of Lukjanczyk’s sculptures with an appraised value of about $345,000.)

During the late 1970s, the artist’s relationship with Abbot Claude Ehringer and the brothers of the Prince of Peace Abbey flowered.

Lukjanczyk, who met Ehringer in 1976, agreed to sculpt several works for the abbey, among them an intricate wooden altar and the St. Benedict statue. In the meantime, with the help of the abbot, the sculptor traveled to Rome to personally present the Pope with the bronze bust in his likeness.

It was perhaps Lukjanczyk’s greatest triumph. But it turned sour for the artist. According to his friends, the bust was soon placed in storage after Austrian officials complained that a statue from their country had been removed to make way for Lukjanczyk’s creation. Moreover, Lukjanczyk complained, the Pope failed to send a personal written note of thanks.

Although Vatican officials now maintain the work is on display in the Pope’s summer residence, Lukjanczyk remains dubious and unimpressed, crushed by treatment he saw as an affront.

In 1984, his marriage in ruins, Lukjanczyk fled to Chicago to stay with friends. Although he disliked the cold winters on Lake Michigan, the sculptor managed to complete numerous works, in particular for a building contractor, Bud Moon, who provided him with work space.

“Some days he’d work 16 hours straight, chain-smoking cigarettes the whole time,” Moon recalled. “That mallet of his would just echo through the building. He’d get that thing going like a woodpecker.”

In early 1986, however, Lukjanczyk decided to return to the West Coast to resume his work for the abbey.

After the fire and his desecration of the wooden statue of St. Benedict, the artist fled to Twentynine Palms, where he had lived off-and-on in a small trailer parked in back of a local inn run by his friends, Ron and Jane Grunt.

Frequented by artists and actors, the Twentynine Palms Inn is set amid an oasis of palm trees in the high desert. The Grunts have served as unofficial caretakers for more than two dozen of Lukjanczyk’s largest sculptures.

By the time Lukjanczyk arrived, the Grunts had already been notified by police to be on the lookout for him. Ron Grunt stayed up all night with the sculptor, talking about what had happened.

The next day, Grunt called police in Oceanside, telling them that Lukjanczyk had confessed to the crime. When detectives Robert Burke and Bob Pratt arrived at the inn, Lukjanczyk had arranged furniture out on one of the inn’s decks for the detectives.

“He sat on the deck in big stuffed chairs with the two cops,” Ron Grunt recalls. “He put some of his sculpture out there for them to see. He tried to make the authorities rather comfortable.”

The detectives convinced the artist, after initial resistance, to go to the sheriff’s substation in nearby Joshua Tree. There, Lukjanczyk treated the pair to a two-hour discourse on why he did it.

In a recent interview at the Vista jail, Lukjanczyk reiterated his motives.

“It comes down to being an outcry against anyone trying to exploit me as an artist,” Lukjanczyk said, noting that he feels his experience with the abbot amounted to just that.

Although the abbot maintains Lukjanczyk was paid in excess of $45,000 for the various works he completed for the abbey, the sculptor says he was insufficiently compensated for his artistic endeavors.

Lukjanczyk said he destroyed the St. Benedict statue because “that piece of work is a symbol of Abbot Claude . . . It was my specific way to stick it to the abbot. It was the only way he could understand personally.”

In particular, Lukjanczyk said the abbot angered him by allowing the construction crew at the abbey to dismantle a new workshop the artist was building with several Polish employees. Moreover, the abbot resisted having a Polish feast at the abbey, then failed to show up for the fete, according to Lukjanczyk.

Such charges have deeply troubled the abbot, an elderly man who still thinks of Lukjanczyk as a friend. The abbot said Lukjanczyk has taken reality “and twisted it.” He says the new workshop was burned up in the fire set by Lukjanczyk. In addition, the abbot said he attended the feast.

“He surely is a troubled man,” Ehringer said. “He’s turned against people who were his best friends . . . He’s trying to find a reason for what he did. He’s pitching around for reasons.

“He can’t blame us,” he said. “We’ve done everything possible to be a help to him. But he’s mentally ill.”

The abbot said he hopes Lukjanczyk “comes out of it. When he is himself, he’s a delightful, enjoyable, pleasant, entertaining man. Respectful in every way and shape. I hope that he pulls out of it.”