Laughing & Crying

London's Victoria and Albert Museum was once considering the purchase of three drawings by a young Pole named Feliks Topolski. Said one committeeman: "We must draw the line somewhere!" Portraitist Augustus John answered the objection with a crack: "But can you draw the line like Topolski?"

The drawings were accepted--and the museum never had reason for regrets. Topolski's tortuous but versatile line, which had led him from Warsaw to London, eventually made him one of Britain's best war artists and earned him an international reputation as a caricaturist besides. Last week Topolski's latest oils and drawings were on exhibition in London's Leicester Galleries and his caricatures brightened the pages of the current Vogue. The sketches (of Churchill, Daladier, Paul Ramadier and Bertrand Russell, among others) were better than his frightening, jumbled paintings of battles and blitz, courts and courtrooms.

George Bernard Shaw, who once commissioned Topolski to illustrate three of his plays, has described him as "perhaps the greatest of all impressionists in black & white." In color, Topolski's impressionism is more lurid than deft. He is at his best doing people. Shaw himself appears (in black & white) as a shaggy, willowy old pantaloon, ready to explode with the wit & wisdom of a ripe old age (see cut).

But another portrait--a self-portrait--held special interest for the great and famous who had felt the stings and stabs of Topolski's pencil. How did the plump, 41-year-old artist see himself? In the portrait, Topolski pictured himself in a highly dramatic light, modestly or perhaps fearfully shielding his eyes from the glare. "I am," he explained to a critic, "an awed, mystified, laughing and crying member of the humanity that watches and participates in the spectacle of history, but is unable to direct it or reason it out."

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