Brand
Topolski, Feliks RA (1907-1989)
Topolski was born in Warsaw where he studied at the Academy of Art while also serving as a cadet at the Artillery Officers' School from 1927 to 1932. He spent time studying on his own in France and Italy before being sent to England in 1935 to record George V's Silver Jubilee for a Polish magazine. He stayed in London permanently, frequenting a literary group at the Café Royal that included Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, J B Priestley and Anthony Powell. They began to commission illustration for magazines and plays, including Bernard Shaw who used him on three works including an edition of Pygmalion. On the outbreak of war in 1939 Topolski began working as honorary official artist to the Polish forces in Britain before being employed by the War Artists Advisory Committee from 1940 as an official war artist for the British. Given Stalin’s reluctance to allow photographic illustrations of conditions in Russia following the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941, the British assigned Topolski to accompany the first Allied aid convoy to the Soviet Union. From then he travelled frenetically across all theatres of operations throughout the war, sketching the common soldier and the general staff alike, in Egypt, East Africa, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, India, the Burma Front, China, France and Germany. He was commissioned to record the London Blitz in 1940 and was wounded while sketching. He followed the Polish 2nd Corps in Italy in the fiercest of fighting and was at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the weeks after its liberation. One of his final official commissions involved visually recording the proceedings at the Nuremburg Trials. He became a naturalised British citizen in 1947.
