The chronicler

Different strokes

The splendour of the Rashtrapati Bhavan is multi-dimensional,” says the official website of the vast four-storied mansion in Delhi. “Few official residential premises of the Head of the State in the world will match the Rashtrapati Bhavan in terms of its size, vastness and its magnificence.”

First occupied by the Viceroy Lord Irwin and Lady Dorothy Irwin in December 1929, the Rashtrapati Bhavan houses a range of history paintings, sculptures, antiquities and tapestries. Browsing page 3 of its e-catalogue, one finds the painting titled Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, 1946, Feliks Topolski, oil on canvas. The adjoining note states that ‘Mahatma Gandhi, the father of our nation, was assassinated by Nathuram Vinayak Godse on January 30, 1948. The foreground (of the painting) lays emphasis on the form of Mahatma Gandhi. He is shown being carried by two women. Behind him, the painting shows numerous rows of people. In a divided formation, highlighted with red and yellow shades, this painting portrays expressions of scream and shock on all the faces. The robust form of a man is positioned with his back towards the onlooker in the extreme right of the painting. He is seen holding two terracotta pots with a stand balanced on his shoulders.’

Examining the painting and the accompanying note, something does not seem to match. While the year of Gandhi’s assassination is 1948, the painting itself was made in 1946! How was this possible? Who was this artist who, by design or chance, could foretell a catastrophic moment which affected the whole of humanity? “Feliks Topolski was born in 1907 and established himself as a Polish-born British artist, focusing on expressionist influences,” says the note accompanying the painting. “He was also an accomplished draughtsman and studied at the Warsaw Academy of Art. During the Second World War, he became a war artist.”

An eyewitness
By all accounts, Topolski was much more than an ordinary artist. An accomplished chronicler of many of the 20th century’s historical events, his work offered commentary on social and political life particularly in the years following World War II. “He was on every Front during World War II — the Arctic convoys, Russia in 1941, Burma and India, the Levant, China, Africa, Europe and the London Blitz where he was wounded,” said Daniel Topolski of his father, in a lecture delivered on March 22, 2010 (‘Feliks Topolski: Eyewitness to the 20th Century’). “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.”

The cultural revolution in China, civil rights movement in America, apartheid in South Africa and May Day parades in Moscow were among the many historical events that Topolski came to witness and record closely. While Topolski’s dramatic and forensically accurate drawings, sketches and paintings were widely circulated in books and periodicals of the day, many of them are to be seen in museums across the world today.

Graham Greene called Topolski an “anthropologist”; while the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw hailed him “an astonishing draughtsman — perhaps the greatest of the impressionists in black and white”. “Topolski was just being driven to make art,” writes Robert Faires, arts editor for The Austin Chronicle. “He made it all the time, filling sketchbooks with drawings of anything and everything: princes and paupers, parks and war zones, babies, scholars, horses, you name it.”

Topolski’s repertoire included an extraordinary array of portraits of celebrities and world leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Mountbatten, George Bernard Shaw, General de Gaulle, Martin Luther King, Pablo Picasso, and Laurence Olivier. However, he did not forget the common people of many lands. The prostitutes in Calcutta; Polish Jews from the pre-war ghettoes; ill-treated Chinese coolies, beggars, wartime refugees, prisoners-of-war, peasants, tramps and pot-smoking hippies... they all found a place in his work.
Topolski initially captured his experiences through pencil and ink drawings. The restless lines (Shaw sometimes derided them as “damned scriggles”) and tangled colours brought in a sense of urgency, immediacy and intimacy.

While there were many admirers of Topolski’s art, some of his work did face some rough weather. On seeing a portrait of his made by Topolski, noted novelist and social commentator J B Priestley wrote: “I have often been portrayed as a bit of a monster, but I have to be shown as my own kind of monster, just as an elephant must not be made to look like a rhinoceros. This caricature sketch-portrait is really quite a shocking job. He has given me concavities in place of convexities, a kind of broken Roman nose instead of my own modest snub, and the drawing is so bad that the head could not possibly go into the hat. ”

Indian connect
Topolski reportedly sketched and painted Gandhi between 1944 and 1946. As a guest of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, and his daughter Indira Gandhi, he came to India at the end of the British Raj and travelled all over the country. In 1949, he returned to India to participate in the celebrations which marked India becoming a republic (January 26, 1950). It was then that he reportedly brought with him his huge painting titled ‘The East’.

Harish Trivedi, writing in The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (2011), explains: “Of the notable paintings of Gandhi, perhaps the most remarkable, for an uncanny non-artistic reason, is the one by Feliks Topolski (1907-89), a Polish-born British artist, which shows Gandhi, bathed in a blood-red light and leaning on two young women, calmly slumping to the ground — except that this was painted in 1946, as if in precise premonition of Gandhi’s assassination two years later. It was later reworked as one part of a large four-panel painting titled The East 1948, which Jawaharlal Nehru acquired on a visit to London in 1949, and which now fills a wall in the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi.”
A man of great charm, Topolski, who died in London on August 24, 1989, aged 82, believed that paintings should be “free from the bounds of overpowering reality”.