Andras Kalman (né Kálmán András) was born into a Jewish family in Mátészalka, Hungary in 1919 and came to England in 1935 aged 16 to study English, then chemistry at Leeds University. After the Second World War, Kalman settled in Manchester where he befriended LS Lowry and opened the Crane Gallery showing work by Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Bernard Leach, among others. Kalman moved to London in 1957, establishing the Crane Kalman Gallery at 178 Brompton Road and later opening two further galleries and a museum in Bath.
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). Separately, Andras Kalman featured in Ben Uri's summer 2024 exhibition: Cosmopolis: The Impact of Refugee Art Dealers in London.
Andras Kalman in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Andras Kalman]
Publications related to [Andras Kalman] in the Ben Uri Library