Feliks Topolski - Life

Life

Felix Topolski was born on 14 August 1907 in Warsaw. He studied in the Warsaw Academy of Art, and trained as an artillery officer.

Later he studied and worked in Italy and France, and eventually he moved to Britain in 1935 after being commissioned to record king George V's silver jubilee. He founded a studio near Waterloo, where there is still a free permanent exhibition which chronicles the 20th century.

He married twice, first to Marian Everall and then Caryl J. Stanley.

In 1939 the George Bernard Shaw play In Good King Charles's Golden Days was published with illustrations by Topolski, bringing his work to a wide audience in the UK.

During the Second World War, Topolski became an official war artist and painted scenes of the Battle of Britain and other battlefields.

After the war he made a celebrated painting about the first meeting of the United Nations. In 1947 he gained British citizenship.

Feliks Topolski’s experiences were initially captured in pencil and ink drawings. These were the first stage of his prolific Chronicles, which appeared fortnightly from 1953 to 1979, interrupted only to accommodate his exploratory investigations across the globe. The Chronicles communicated his art and observations to a wider audience. They were independently published, without advertisements or subsidies. Since his death in 1989 Topolski’s Chronicles have retained respect as a pictorial and political record spanning nearly thirty years of world history. The Chronicles contain 3,000 drawings, and were exhibited in New York, Moscow, Cologne, Hamburg, Hawaii, Tel Aviv and serialised in the United States, Poland, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland. As Joyce Carey wrote, it is ‘the most brilliant record we have of the contemporary scene as seized by a contemporary mind.’

Topolski painted portraits of contemporaries, including the authors H.G. Wells, Graham Greene, John Mortimer and Evelyn Waugh, and politicians Harold Macmillan and Aneurin Bevan, He also painted murals, contributed to BBC programs, such as Face to Face and designed theatrical sets. Between 1975 and his death he worked on a 600 ft mural in railway arches on London's South Bank, depicting events and people of the 20th century. It is open to the public as the Topolski Century.

In 1989 he was elected a senior Royal Academician as a draughtsman.

Feliks Topolski died in London on 24 August 1989. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, north London.

His son, Daniel Topolski, was a notable rower who captained Oxford in the Boat Race.