Draftsman of War

The Polish artist Feliks Topolski, whom George Bernard Shaw has called "perhaps the greatest of all impressionists in black & white," will shortly leave England for Gibraltar, Africa, Persia and India to continue drawing and painting the "entire phantasmagoria" of World War II. FORTUNE for January contains a ten-page portfolio of Topolski's masterly impressions of U.S. troops in Britain and Northern Ireland.

Enraged by the massacre of his country, Topolski has lacerated Fascism with numerous brilliantly satirical cartoons. Where Goya fought sadism in war with purposely sadistic drawings of actual fighting, Topolski expresses total war through images of Russian peasants, London women and children bombed out of their homes, soldiers worn out after battle, firemen exhausted after days & nights of blitz, crowds rushing for safety--pathetic rather than cruel facts of war.

Topolski's art is in the tradition of the great draftsmen Daumier, Callot, Hogarth, his earlier work astoundingly like that of France's Benjamin-Constant. Says Topolski: "My particular love, my aim, and object in art" is Descriptive Draftsmanship--which he believes to be perishing.

Born in Warsaw in 1907, plump, humorous, brown-eyed Feliks Topolski studied at Warsaw's Academy of Art, decorated

Warsaw nightclubs, while doing his military service in a Polish Cavalry Regiment designed his own uniform of pure white with gold braid and buttons. One night, while a guest in one of his self-decorated nightclubs, he was approached by a captain who had been instructed by a major at another table to ask Topolski what uniform he was wearing. Answered Topolski: "My own." The major was amused and ordered Topolski to take it off. But the captain whispered that Topolski would not be court-martialed if he did not. Says Topolski: "I didn't."

In 1935 a Polish magazine commissioned Topolski to draw the ceremonies of King George V's Silver Jubilee. Topolski was so fascinated by such English institutions as pubs, the Derby and the Eton & Harrow cricket match that he stayed on, published a book of satirical drawings appreciatively lampooning Britain's pomps and humors. With the enthusiastic support of famed British Painter Augustus Edwin John, London's ultra-conservative Victoria & Albert Museum purchased three Topolski drawings. Only one member of the Museum's committee objected--on the ground that they were the work of a too young foreigner. The committeeman said: "We must draw the line somewhere." Cracked Augustus John: "But can you draw the line like Topolski?"

Bernard Shaw, who commissioned Topolski to illustrate three of his plays, remarked that Topolski "succeeds so admirably at what Picasso tries to do. When Feliks draws something it looks awkward until it is finished--when Picasso draws something it looks awkward after it is finished."

When the Nazis bombed England, Topolski "wandered about gaping, secure in a curious self-imagined sense of being only a spectator behind the footlights. . . ." While he was sketching a Wren church in the middle of a night blitz, a huge bomb blew the church away, hurled Topolski to the ground. He was five weeks in the hospital. Says he: "I was still trying not to miss anything of the show."

Says Topolski of a Russian trip: "I learned to mistrust 'foreign observers.' "

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