Feliks Topolski R.A. - Critics' comments

ARTS Underneath the arches Andrew Roberts, The Spectator, 26 November 2005 "Feliks Topolski's 'Memoir of the Twentieth Century' ... is as enormous a statement on the last century as it is a vast physical entity itself. .... Although the painting was donated to the nation in 1984, it is in a very bad state of repair today ... and in desperate need of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant if it is to survive into our present century. This it must do, as it stands as a unique testimony on the 20th century, from someone who knew very many of the leading protagonists in it."

Thanks for the Memoir

Heather Neill, The Times Educational Supplement Teacher, 17 February 2006

The Oxford Companion to Art

"Topolski ... stands out among other 20th Century artists for his virtuosity as a draughtsman and his panoramic vision, consistently exploring the recording function of the artist-draughtsman.''

Copyright: T Burstyn

Alan Brien, Punch

"... his giant Memoir, in colour and on a grandiose old masterly scale, quartered in a brick dungeon like a Piranesi engraving, manages to distil the essence and apotheosis of his genius. Reworked and magnified from the thousands of sketches he has created hour by hour during an amazingly eventful career, they are for me one of our Century's great solid achievements."

Graham Greene, Night and Day

"... our weekly page of drawings by Feliks Topolski, a talented anthropologist who is conducting a little regular field-work in these islands and who lays bare, as with a scalpel, the essential whatever-it-is of Britain's most cherished institutions."

Andrew Ritchie, New York Museum of Modern Art

"Today Topolski has perhaps no equal as a reportorial draughtsman."

Sir John Rothenstein, Tate Gallery, London

"We should be grateful that an artist of such panoramic vision, animated by so robust an interest in the whole life of man as Feliks Topolski, is at work among us ..."

George Bernard Shaw

"Topolski ... an astonishing draughtsman, perhaps the greatest of all the impressionists in black and white."

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