Organised jointly by the Topolski Memoir Charity and the Granville-Skarbek Anglo-Polish Cultural Exchange, the debate aims to look at what the organisers say is “the chronic underrepresentation of the culture and the arts of one of the UK’s largest diasporas in the British media and cultural institutions.”
The panelists include Marta de Zuniga, director of the Polish Cultural Institute in London.
The participants in the event will have the opportunity to tour an exhibition of work by Feliks Topolski, a Polish expressionist painter and draughtsman who worked primarily in Britain.
The exhibition has reopened in the artist’s studio under the railway arches of Hungerford Bridge next to London's Royal Festival Hall, for the first time after his death in 1989.
Entitled Punks, Princes and Protests, it showcases Topolski’s lifelong commitment to reportage.
Topolski’s commission from the British government to record Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 became the impetus for his Chronicle.
Published between 1953 and 1979, this bimonthly broadsheet charted the world’s changing social, political and cultural movements of the 20th century.
Born in 1907, Topolski graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw. Having settled in England in 1935, he became extremely popular as a portrait artist and war correspondent for the Polish and British press.
(mk/gs)