Hi,

This week, I want to talk briefly about the artist Feliks Topolski, a close friend of my father Marek Zulawski.

But before I get to that, I just want to mention the opening of the Toruń CSW exhibition of Marek's work is still on for September 15th, but likely to be at 10am in the morning! The date changed a few times over the last couple of weeks due to scheduling conflicts - both the UK Ambassador to Poland and the Polish Ambassador to the UK are hoping to come. Apparently, mornings are more doable than evenings for high-calibre diplomats.

Whoever ends up coming in the end, it looks like we will all be drinking coffee instead of wine. Cheers!

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The artist who moved from a canal to a bridge

An exhibition in honour of Feliks Topolski (1907-1989) is currently on in London. Initially shown at the South Bank, it has just moved to Hammersmith. Hence I thought I'd write a little about him.

In 1935, a young artist was commissioned to come from Poland and record George V's silver jubilee in drawings. He never went home.

Feliks Topolski spent the next 50 years building a legacy by observing society in all its forms. He got to know both the upper and lower classes, the artistic and military elite. Besides his artistic skills, he was a supreme social butterfly that built an enviable network thanks to his keen interest in people's lives.

Described by the late Prince Phillip as 'a master of visual commentary', Topolski made a massive 100-foot-long frieze for the Queen's husband that still hangs in the corridors of Buckingham Palace. You can see a blurry photo of him with it here:

War-torn Little Venice

The 2023 Topolski exhibition was initially held in the artist's former studios under Hungerford Bridge by the Royal Festival Hall. Part of the studios were converted into a bar about a decade ago. But Topolski only moved to Hungerford Bridge in the 1950s.

During the war years, he actually lived next door to my father in Little Venice, in a spot that is today a small public garden right by the canal junction.

Here is Marek on what life in Little Venice was like back in those days - it was certainly not the expensive place it is now:

At the time, Feliks and I were living in those dilapidated old workshops on that magic canal that cuts through London linking the middle of England with the Thames harbour. Tall grass and a jungle of saplings separated us from each other.

The leburnum flowers burned like yellow flames every spring, while long barges carrying coal or iron chips passed by along the canal. Their quarter-decks had curtains, women and children painted with roses, elephants and castles on blue backgrounds: recent examples of English folklore. They were dragged along by thick-legged heavy-set horses walking along the well-trodden paths of the canal banks.

There was a war on. The Second World War. The Germans always bombed the railroads, so the canal, dormant for two hundred years, had come back to life.

On one side our garden was shared by the great ruined Fulthorpe House, empty and abandoned, full of splendid panelling, marble fireplaces and Italian tiles. From there, we mercilessly removed useful cupboards, screens and kitchen cabinets with drawers made of flawless knotless plank to furnish our empty studios. Flashlights would flicker from the upper floors at night. There were giggles and singing. It was vagrants, mocking the bombing, and performing their drunken rites there.

I grew mushrooms in the spacious cellars of the house - every morning Halinka came to the workshop to collect these white round bubbles, which she later sold for good money at the nearby Esplanade hotel, where the Słonimskis, Miłosz and black-browed Ksawery Pruszyński stayed. Meat was strictly rationed back then, so our mushrooms were very popular.

On the other side of the garden, behind a wall of nettles and wild roses, stood an asymmetrical tall building, an empty and forgotten former home of Napoleon III. Locked up tight, it awaited demolition or a German bomb, many of which were falling all around it.

In the middle of the harbour basin, where boats and barges were parked, there was an island where a pair of swans lived under an elderberry bush, and water rats hid in the muddy shores. I visited this domain of rats and swans in a yellow inflatable canoe, which had a flame-red sail and a habit of turning in circles on its flat bottom. It was part of the standard equipment of the pilots whose lives it saved when they jumped from burning planes into the cold waters of the English Channel.

It's no wonder the council ended up tearing down all these buildings and created Rembrandt Gardens instead.

Marek on Felik's art

As for Feliks' art, he had a best-selling book of caricatures and was never lacking commissions. He did portraits of royalty, as well as PM Harold MacMillan and the authors HG Wells and Evelyn Waugh. The UK government owns dozens of his artworks. 

Topolski was probably the most successful Polish British artist there's been when it comes down to it. And even though I suspect my father felt like second fiddle to him, he clearly respected his work too:

Feliks is always immensely curious about other people's lives. Fascinated by the cavalcade of human comedy - ritual, ceremony, gesture and costume - more than any other artist of our time, Feliks Topolski embraced with his covetous and penetrating gaze the totality of this exclusively human affair that is called the history of the epoch.

On the one hand, he has a humanistic interest as an observer, and on the other, a courageous readiness for his own adventures. Hence the sometimes fantastic coincidences which allowed him to turn up with a sketchbook in hand wherever something interesting was happening, and to meet on his way the most important actors in the drama of history.

His focus is the human panorama, full of flawless costume details and accurate characterisation. It is painting on a monumental scale. That is why galleries do not care about him. He does not enjoy the support of official institutions, either avant-garde or traditional. He has created his own market for himself, his own system of buying and selling, and has found himself patrons where one would least expect it.

Topolski's style is easily recognisable. He is characterised by baroque compositions consisting of realistic figures in unrealistic arrangements or in unreal space. His crowded wall paintings, in particular, tend to have an abstract structure that serves him as a backdrop for the numerous - often overly numerous - realistic elements that fill every empty space in the painting. For Feliks Topolski suffers from horror vacui.

The colour of his paintings is eminently expressionistic and intended to heighten the mood of the figure or situation. Therefore, it is fundamentally dependent on the subject - it is part of that subject and has no autonomous worth. The colour accuracy we so often encounter in his paintings is mainly due to the accuracy of the placement of the colour patches in the painting, or, in other words, in the drawing.

In general, I believe - and Topolski's painting is an example of this - that if the drawing (i.e. the composition) is accurate, then almost every colour turns out to be right.

On the other hand, if the drawing is wrong, even the most sophisticated colours will not save the painting. Feliks Topolski is a painter who knows how to draw. The dynamic rhetoric of his works - their theatricality and swagger - is evident in both concept and form.

Felix always tells a story with his paintings. And in doing so, he is always more concerned with passionate commentary than with a finished work of art. Hence the sketch-like character not only of his drawings, but even of his largest wall paintings.

Again, if you'd like to see the exhibition but missed its South Bank version, it's now on at the POSK in Hammersmith.

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Video recommendation of the week

There is a long-running compilation series on YouTube showing how there are hidden Polish phrases in English- and Spanish-language pop songs. Here is one of many. This one is also good.

It's the most bilingual form of comedy imaginable and I think it works brilliantly, as it makes you question your ears. Maybe The Police really did sing that bottle song as "Nie stać cię na baton"?

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That's all for this week. Many thanks for reading. Don't forget to brush your teeth tonight, your molars really appreciate it.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Other stuff

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