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'Paris Lost' Drawings- The Story- Part V

Tuesday 10 August 2010

By Topolski Century Gallery

So convinced was Topolski that the drawings had gone forever that he even allowed himself in 1954 to be persuaded by an eccentric continental jurist that there was a case to be presented to the Foreign Claims Commission for compensations for the lost drawings; he hardly pursued the matter.

What Topolski never knew when he was tramping the ruins of Berlin in 1945 as an Official War Artist was that the drawings were already safe in the hands of one Dr. Hans Cürlis, the Director of the Kulturfilm- Institute GmbH in Berlin, who was now in his 85th year. On 15th of May 1963, Dr. Kürlis wrote to Topolski for the first time to say that he had bought a parcel of drawings shortly after the end of the war form a Russian soldier in East Berlin and that they were in good condition. The soldier had been extremely selective and out of all the property available for looting he had, with a connoisseur's eye, picked the Topolski drawings out of the ruins of Berlin.

In February 1965, thanks to the warm co-operation of Dr. Cürlis, the drawings were returned to Topolski who had not seen them for a quarter of a century. With casual modesty he calls them' just some drawings of Paris that I did before the war...'

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