Born: 1919 Mátészalka, Hungary
Died: 2007 London, England
Year of Migration to the UK: 1935
Other name/s: Kálmán András, André Kalman
Biography
Art dealer, gallerist and collector, Andras Kalman (né Kálmán András) was born into a Jewish family in Mátészalka, Hungary on 24 May 1919. At the age of 16, he came to England to learn English, prior to studying chemistry at Leeds University. His family, who remained in Hungary, all perished in the Holocaust; his brother Tamás was murdered in the town square, while brother Gábor survived the liberation of Dachau only to die of typhus. After the war Kalman settled in Manchester, where he earned money as a tennis coach (he was a professional level player and represented Hungary at Wimbledon). He became a naturalised British citizen in 1952. With the financial support of his close friend, Joseph Braka, a Cheshire-born businessman of Syrian/Lebanese Jewish descent, Kalman opened the Crane Gallery in King Street, Manchester in an abandoned air raid shelter, showing work by Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Bernard Leach, as well as Lucian Freud, John Craxton and others. The name of the gallery allegedly originated from an error in which the typesetter of the Manchester Guardian could not decipher Kalman's handwriting and published his announcement as 'Crane' Gallery Opening rather than 'new' gallery. Kalman found it amusing and adopted the name. Later the venture caught LS Lowry's attention, who bought a painting and they began a lifelong friendship.
Kalman moved to London in 1957 and set up Crane Kalman Gallery at 178 Brompton Road, Knightsbridge (where it is still located), where he showed work by many artists who were considered critically unfashionable, both British and continental, including Winifred Nicholson, Alan Lowndes and the Spanish painter Celso Lagar. In the opening year Kalman presented shows of artists based in the north of England, a number patronised by important Jewish collectors (Jewish Chronicle, 15 November 1957). In 1968 Kalman held a show entitled The Loneliness of LS Lowry. In 1977 the exhibition Silence in Painting showed work by Giorgio Morandi, Ben Nicholson and the East Anglian painter, Mary Newcomb. Kalman married Dorothy Wareing in 1961 and together they privately acquired a huge collection of English naïve art and furniture. Their British Folk Art Collection was eventually bought by the Peter Moores Foundation and can now be viewed at Compton Verney in Warwickshire.
Andras Kalman died in London, England on 26 July 2007. Kalman's role as an émigré gallerist was explored posthumously in Sotheby's 2019 exhibition Brave New Visions: The Émigrés who Transformed the British Art World and accompanying catalogue. The London gallery continues to remain with the family through Kalman's son and daughter, Andrew and Sally, while his other son Richard runs Crane Kalman Brighton, a gallery founded in 2005, specialising in photography. In 2013, the Kalman family donated The Lecture (aka Letter to an Anti-Semite) (1935), a work on paper by German Expressionist, George Grosz (1893-1959) to the Ben Uri Collection in honour of their late father. The work has subsequently featured in several exhibitions including Out of Chaos: 100 Years of Ben Uri in London, the gallery's centenary exhibition held at Somerset House, London (2015); , The Drawing Room (2017) and Exodus: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection, Bushey Museum (2018)
Related books
- Cherith Summers, Brave New Visions: The Émigrés who Transformed the British Art World, exhib. cat. (2019)
- Lawrence Goldman ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
- William D. Rubinstein, Michael Jolles, Hilary L. Rubinstein eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
- Gyula Ernyey ed., Britain and Hungary: Contacts in Architecture and Design During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century: Essays and Studies, Vol. 3 (Budapest: Hungarian University of Craft and Design, 2005)
- Andras Kalman and Andrew Lambirth, LS Lowry Conversation Pieces (London: Chaucer Press, 2003)
- Shelley Rohde, L S Lowry: A Biography (Manchester: Lowry Press, 1999)
- Charles Spencer, In the Picture, Jewish Chronicle, Supplement 30 March 1990, pp. 6-16
- Charles Spencer, Art Attack, Jewish Chronicle, 29 March 1985, pp. 36-37
- English Naive Paintings from the Collection of Mr. & Mrs. A. Kalman, London (London: Crane Kalman Gallery, 1976)
Public collections
Related organisations
- Crane Gallery (co-founder)
- Crane Kalman Gallery (founder)
Related web links
- Andras Kalman naturalistion
- Andras Kalman Obituary, The Guardian, 14 September 2007
- Andrew and Sally Kalman on their father, Andras Kalman
- British Folk Art Collection
- Cherith Summers, Brave New Visions: The Émigrés who Transformed the British Art World, 2019, online catalogue
- Photo of Dorothy and Andras Kalman with Sir Martyn Beckett, Lady Beckett and Ben Nicholson at the Tate Archives
Selected exhibitions
- Brave New Visions: The Émigrés who Transformed the British Art World, Sotheby's (2019)
- Silence in Painting, Crane Kalman Gallery (1999)
- The Loneliness of L S Lowry, Crane Kalman Gallery (1968)
Ben Uri collection
Andras Kalman in the Ben Uri collection
Ben Uri archive
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Andras Kalman]
Ben Uri library
Publications related to [Andras Kalman] in the Ben Uri Library