For more than twenty years, one of the most unusual exhibitions in London has been Feliks Topolski's monumental installation "The Memoir of the Century". This 600-foot long panoramic painting, standing from 12 to 20 feet high, was created in railway arches 150, 151 and 152 of Hungerford Bridge, on London's South Bank. Begun by the sixty-eight-year-old Topolski in 1975, and still unfinished at the time of his death in 1989, it still sits under the arches, close to the constant activity of the South Bank and the flow of the Thames, gently shaken by the regular rumble of trains in and out of Charing Cross on the other side of the river.
"The Memoir" was Topolski's attempt to paint the twentieth century. His studio, in a nearby arch below the Festival Hall, had a small kitchen and bed where he used to sleep while working on it. Parts of the "Memoir" seem less like a painting than a protest made in prison: a fevered scratching on the walls of a dungeon to record the passing days. Parts are only roughed out, some are hard to decipher, and sections have been damaged by dripping water and by the very passage of time that Topolski tried to record. But the great dramas of the century are here, with portraits of around 700 of its leading figures.
The arches housing the "Memoir" have only ever been open for three hours each evening, in the pattern Topolski himself established, but in recent years the painting nevertheless drew in more than 15,000 visitors annually. Now the work is in urgent need of restoration, and the space has been closed for vital work to be carried out. Private visits can still be arranged, but, sadly, it will be closed for the centenary of Topolski's birth in August this year.
In its present state the "Memoir" has a forlorn feel. The painter Jeffrey Dennis called it "an out-of-season ghost train", and, as you walk through the labyrinth of brickwork and paint, Topolski's lines tangle and coalesce around you, spectres rise up like stage ghosts, and it indeed has the air of a neglected fairground attraction. The famous and forgotten stare back at you from the great screens, and comments in the visitors' book focus on this eerie effect of "Lots of faces" and "Bloody wicked faces everywhere". Topolski tried to see everything the twentieth century had to offer, and at one level his "Memoir" is an act of witness. Born in Poland in 1907, he studied at the Warsaw Academy of Art, and began travelling in his twenties. From then onwards regular foreign assignments allowed him to follow news throughout the world, and to meet all the people in his paintings. Topolski reached London in 1935, with a commission to record the Silver Jubilee of George V, and decided to make his home among the exotic English, with their subtle nuances of class, dress and uniform.
Topolski was an indefatigable pictorial journalist, and his rapid sketches, capturing both the form and movement of his subjects, became popular in British newspapers, magazines and books. In 1940 he became an official war artist, and consolidated his reputation with a series of drawings of the London Blitz. In 1941 he was sent on a convoy to Russia, and afterwards undertook commissions in Egypt, Africa, Burma, China, Italy and France. He followed the armies into Germany, saw the death camp at Belsen, and attended the Nuremberg trials.
Topolski then began the first of his great memorializations of passing events. In 1951 he was commissioned to create "The Cavalcade of the Commonwealth", a 60 foot by 20-foot painting for the Festival of Britain. He relocated his studio to the South Bank, where the incessant activity of trains and builders suited his energies, and in 1953 followed the "Cavalcade" with Topolski's Chronicle, a fortnightly broadsheet of sketches and text which ran for thirty years. Its style was that of "the crude, vital woodcuts of the old broadsheets", and, while overtly art as news, it also proclaimed news as history, history as narrative, and narrative as art. "The material is immense", Topolski told one interviewer, "but my appetite for it is simply gluttonous." The series eventually contained some 3,000 drawings.
There were other precursors of the "Memoir". In 1958, Prince Philip commissioned Topolski to create a panoramic painting of the 1953 Coronation of Elizabeth II for Buckingham Palace. Topolski designed this processional painting as "a sort of portrait of modern England", where the royal couple moved between groups of figures representing the nation. It was made in fourteen sections, nearly 100 feet long in total, and stood in Topolski's studio as a great horseshoe enclosure before being delivered to the Palace in 1960. The Queen reportedly thought it ghastly, and it has been criticized as "a 90-foot blur", but it set a pattern for the "Memoir".
The art establishment viewed Topolski's impressionistic portraits with suspicion, and dismissed him as a caricaturist or a journalist. But he nevertheless became one of the best-known and most fashionable artists in Britain. "He got in everywhere", says his daughter Tessa, and he knew everyone. From 1975 onwards he reworked a lifetime of sketches into "The Memoir of the Century", and, as you walk its length, you encounter a fantastic jumble of figures: Augustus John and Graham Greene at the Cafe Royal, Winston Churchill and Bob Boothby at the Coronation, Bob Dylan and Elvis, Kennedy and Khrushchev, Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers, Chairman Mao, Nehru and Indira Gandhi. In his daughter's words, the "Memoir" recorded "what was happening in Feliks's world -which was the world". As well as oil paint on board and canvas, Topolski used many different media to create his "Memoir". Documents are stuck to its surface, objects are incorporated in it, music was commissioned for it, and parts of it were to have been presented as slides and film.
Topolski even hoped that dramas would be performed within it. He was constantly striving for new effects. In one section the painting of Belsen continues across the floor, and, looking up, a mirror on the ceiling shows you to be in the pit with the bodies. There is also a huge rotating structure which Topolski, with characteristic grandiose vagueness, christened the "apotheosis-bathos of the United Nations".
"The Memoir" concludes with what Topolski called the challenge of "the 'alternative' young": "Vietnam . . . and all over the west the eruption of rock-pop-pot-hippydom-yippydom-freakdom". Topolski embraced it all, sketching hippies, happenings and student confrontations in Britain and the United States, and experimenting with drugs under the supervision of Timothy Leary. But his true addiction was always to fame and the famous. The "Memoir" itself ends in 1978, with its own creation.
The final section is a huge movable canvas mounted on vertical rollers, carrying contemporary images and entitled "the Diary". In this section, to quote Topolski, "the Memoir reaches the present, becomes the Diary and continues from day to day, to be cut short only by nature's will". For Topolski that came just after his election to the Royal Academy.
The restoration of this huge installation is being driven by Topolski's children, Tessa and Daniel. Topolski gave his "Memoir" to the people of London in 1984, but the burden of upkeep proved too great, and in 2002 the family stepped in and established a new trust, Topolski Memoir Ltd, to take ownership of the work and oversee its restoration and display. This project requires Pounds 3.3 million, of which more than Pounds 2 million has already been raised, from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other sponsors. Work is beginning this year and the newly restored Memoir will reopen in 2009, twenty years after Topolski's death.
But can the ghost train really be made to run again? The "Memoir" represents Topolski's life, his work, and his life's work, and it was animated by his presence. He once declared that "I mean to go on painting . . . for as many yards, or curving twisted miles as I shall last", and, although the "Memoir" is the testimony of an eyewitness, it is also a very personal record of "dreams and associations". What can be made of the labyrinth now that the man who created it is dead?
The relaunch will incorporate a "Topolski brand" to unite the two sites, the studio and the "Memoir". Planned elements include "a multi-media Centre of the 20th Century" offering "a unique experience and a personal insight into our recent history". But interpreting the "Memoir" presents considerable problems. Topolski saw it as a space where visitors could find themselves and their own century. He aimed "to provoke . . . freewheeling imaginings, detached from an explanatory habit of mind", and if a single meaning was applied to this meandering panorama, much of the thrill of seeing it would be lost. Can this ambiguity be communicated through "touch screens and interpretative material"? And is it worth the investment and effort? Isn't the whole thing just a conceit -obscurity posing as complexity, a confusion which hints at a meaning it doesn't contain? Isn't the viewer left to create forms and shapes from the chaos, just as critics suggested they had to with Topolski's sketches? Perhaps he left us to make sense of the fragments of his life, in a way that he could not. "Feliks never threw anything away", his daughter recalls, "because that was his job -to bear witness." But perhaps this was how he maintained his self-belief, by challenging nothing and leaving his doubts and uncertainties to London as a legacy.
There are certainly large contradictions within the canvas maze. For one thing, Topolski argued that modern society was masses on the move, but the anonymous masses are conspicuously absent. There are also contradictions in the emotional scale of the work, for although the evils of the century are vast, its pleasures seem little more than naughty indiscretions -a lascivious barrister here, a smacked bottom there, and hippies smoking pot. There is also the contradiction ever present in fame itself, between the public face and the private portrait, the individuals whom Topolski sketched, and the international symbols they had already become.
But despite all this, "The Memoir" should be restored, and must be kept in its place beneath the arches. It is hard to understand what it is until you have seen it in the place where it was made, and then you realize that, like its creator, it is maddening but never dull, and, like the century it represents, it defies simple explanation.
