Feliks Topolski: Eye Witness to the 20Th Century Transcript

Feliks Topolski: Eye witness to the 20th Century Transcript Date: Monday, 22 March 2010 - 12:00AM Location: Museum of London Feliks Topolski: Eye Witness to the 20th Century Delivered by Daniel Topolski 22/3/2010 My father Feliks Topolski fell in love with London when he first came to Britain in 1935 to fulfil a commission for Polish newspapers to cover the Silver Jubilee celebrations of King George V. It was, he said, London's 'exotic otherness' - the revered yet absurd world of British social custom and distinctions - that fired his imagination: judges in wigs, City gents in bowler hats, grand state ceremonial parades with the military in exuberant costumes, Henley Royal Regatta and Ascot - this was meat and drink for an artist in thrall to humanity and all its endless foibles. Compared to what he described as drab central Europe, London was bliss. His urge, his mission in life, was to 'bear witness', to chronicle the major political and social events and the iconic historical personalities that defined and fashioned the 20th Century. His reach was global but his base, heart and centre was London. It was from here that he sallied forth to draw our worlds- unfolding history as it happened - on the spot. An eye-witness to our lives, spanning 9 decades. His love of London though meant that he focussed a huge amount of his attention on the city and its inhabitants and the extraordinary social changes that were taking place after the war: art, royal weddings and coronations, hippies, punks, theatre, famous personalities. Topolski was, according to playwright George Bernard Shaw, 'an astonishing draughtsman - perhaps the greatest of the impressionists in black and white'. He collaborated with Shaw on many of his productions, as set and costume designer and illustrator of his books, including the Penguin edition of Pygmalion. Topolski's true and honest depictions were stunningly accurate, infused with movement, humour and compassion and performed with deceptive ease. As an outsider, an immigrant, the eye he cast over his new fellow citizens, was always unexpected. He had an aversion to cliché and received ideas, which meant that his view - his approach and style- was unique and compelling. I would say that the central European observer has always brought a new and intellectually thought - provoking dimension to the way we see ourselves - Hungarian film makers in America, Polish writers in Africa, Jews everywhere. My father's, often satirical, depiction of the Great and the Good in law, theatre, literature, sport, fashion, politics as well as life on the street - were well documented in his many books of images, in journals and of course in exhibitions. They were very prominent too in television programmes like the BBC's 1961 seminal series Face to Face - 50 minute long, in-depth interviews by John Freeman, each introduced by 5 or 6 penetrating Topolski portraits, of some 36 iconic figures of the time: people like writer Evelyn Waugh, Lord Shawcross the prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials and civil rights leader Martin Luther King ; the whole series has just been released as a DVD box set. Also during this early 60's period he produced his series of 20 portraits of great British Writers for the Harry Ransome centre at the University of Texas in Austin. I'll say more on that commission a bit later. Many of Topolski's works are held in the collections of big public institutions like The National Portrait Gallery, the V & A, the Tate, the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum - and in private collections such as the one belonging to the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen's which hangs on the walls of their apartments at Windsor Castle and in the corridors of Buckingham Palace. But he had to tussle constantly with a suspicious arts world 'both the avant-garde and the traditionalists - which had difficulty defining him. He was unfashionable. He didn't fit into the easy pigeonholes, mainly because he covered so many different 'isms'. Yet his work was utterly recognisable - never bowing to abstract expressionism, photo-realism or conceptual art. When the Trustees of the Tate were discussing whether to include some of his pictures in their collection, one said: 'Too many lines. It's caricature' another said: 'we have to draw the line somewhere.' Suddenly, a hitherto silent Augustus John, intervened: 'Yes, but can you draw the line as well as Topolski?' That decided it: they took the pictures. I suspect that my father was a little hurt that, while he was honoured all over the world, official recognition was long withheld in his chosen homeland. He affected not to care but when he was made a Royal Academician two years before he died he was secretly very pleased. A serial unconventionalist, his style and vision was informed by his desire to document the century - to be at the centre of the action. He was fixed on contemporary themes and he did not work with other painters praise in mind; he not self-indulgent. He always wanted direct contact with ordinary people and was concerned with making a statement about a person, an event or an attitude. In a call to his fellow artists to engage with the world, he told them 'the airless studios grow stifling. Kick the door open-the hum of life turns into a roar. All humanity is out there.' He was quoted in the Listener in 1946 saying - We need an art of synthesis, painting fed on reality, the reality of today, aware of multitudes on the move, of global oneness, torn by conflicts, and achieved, not by retrogression into 'realism', but through the formal freedom won by modern art.' His early years were influenced by radical, atheist parents, Jewish born but deciding soon after his birth in 1907, to change their name and religion in a central Europe awash with pogroms and anti Semitism. At the age of seven, sitting outside his Warsaw home, he was drawing Cossacks riding through the streets and making illustrations of the stories in his favourite Polish books. His mother Stanislawa recognising his talent, encouraged him and worked hard to support him. He enrolled at the Warsaw Academy of Art and came under the influence of the Director, Janus Pruszkowksi where he developed his great ability as a draughtsman. He was increasingly commissioned by Polish newspapers to produce caricatures and cartoons during the 20's - socially a golden liberal age in Poland. His father Edward was an actor, taking his theatre troupe on tour to entertain the soldiers on the front lines, enjoying in particular the role of Napoleon Bonaparte in George Bernard Shaw's Man of Destiny. Shaw was a popular figure in Poland and when my father first arrived in London he quickly established contact with him. They enjoyed a fruitful collaboration and friendship until the playwright's death. His parents had separated when he was quite young and he saw little of his father for a long period, spotting him occasionally, strutting in fine and dandyish clothes, around Warsaw's fashionable streets. They later began to see more of each other until Edward's unexpected death in 1925. His mother had re- married but died undergoing an operation not long afterwards while my father, trained as a cavalry officer, was away on military manoeuvres. Thus freed from family ties he embarked on what was to become a life dedicated to recording the seismic events that were to transform the 20thcentury, the social and cultural changes that provided the colourful backdrop, and the iconic personalities and the humble foot soldiers at the head and heart of it all. He was in England when war broke out and was unable to join his military unit back in Poland. Instead he became a war artist for the Allies and for Poland. He was on every Front during WWII - the Arctic convoys, Russia in 1941, Burma and India, the Levant, China, Africa, Europe and the London Blitz where he was wounded, having been driven day and night around the burning city by his then girlfriend, my mother Marion Everall; she was one of the great film director Alexander Korda's actresses and a passionate political activist. She had introduced him, a newly arrived yet already feted foreigner, to the cultural life of London: to the Café Royal crowd who met there at the weekends for brunch - Augustus John the painter, critic Cyril Connolly, firebrand Labour politician Nye Bevan, actor Michael Redgrave, Graham Greene, the writer - a wonderful coming together of politics and the arts. They all became the subjects of great paintings and drawings by the charming and pushy newcomer to London's social world. My father had an extraordinary ability to penetrate everywhere - high or low society - British royalty, Apartheid South Africa, an Elvis Presley newsconference, Chilean Junta leaders, America's Black Panther inner circle. He created the first cover of Graham Greene's short lived but influential literary review Night and Day and had a book of his London drawings published within months of arriving in Britain. His wider reputation began to form as Hitler invaded his homeland. Throughout the war he sent his dramatic and forensically accurate drawings back to Picture Post, the Illustrated London News and the News Chronicle. In the absence of television and the restrictions imposed on photographic reportage, Topolski's drawings were how many people in the UK saw the war. One woman wrote to thank the editor of Picture Post: she had heard nothing from her husband in eight months and had assumed he was dead; but she had just seen the current issue of Picture Post and there, in a drawing by Topolski, was her husband on board his ship, playing the spoons and she knew that he was alive.

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