L.S. Lowry RA (1887-1976)

Overview

An exhibition to mark the 70th anniversary of Crane Kalman Gallery's long association with L.S. Lowry who first visited the Crane Gallery (as it was then known) located in Manchester.

In the winter of 1949, Andras Kalman opened a gallery in a basement air-raid shelter in South King Street, where the weekly £2 rent was paid by the regular pawning of his typewriter. By a lot of persuasion and not a little charm, both of which he can display in abundance, he managed to obtain for his first exhibition, works by Sir Jacob Epstein, Matthew Smith, Lucian Freud and John Craxton. Invitations to a private view were sent to every influential name he could discover, from members of the Art Gallery Committee to town councillors. No one came. Not one single dignitary, critic or buyer had either replied or responded.

The second exhibition threatened to be as great a disaster as the first. On the third day Lowry appeared; down the steps he came, buzzing like a bluebottle around the gallery until, summing up the situation, he bought a picture. Kalman recalls, 'It cost him about £20 and I think he bought it only to give my morale a boost.'

Kalman already knew of Lowry by repute as a 'conversational painter, regarded with great suspicion locally.' Now he was to know the man. Visits to the gallery were followed by trips across the road for tea at Fuller's, where they ate walnut cake and discussed for hours their own highly individual views on dealers and artists. ('London's dealers', said Kalman, 'consider themselves more important than the artists, sitting in their galleries like brothel-keepers of Amsterdam.' 'In reality,' said Lowry, 'they are just grocers who sell paintings.')

Kalman became fiercely resentful of the establishment's treatment of his friend: 'You had to see that this was an exceptional man; his whole way of life, speaking, eating, were against the norm. There was a strong integrity about him-you had to be an insensitive moron not to see it in the man.'

In the year that Kalman first exhibited Lowry's work in 1952 (it was not a notable success) the artist reached his 65th birthday. All the time he had continued to work as cashier and bookkeeper at the Pall Mall (Property Company) and he now retired with a pension of £200 a year.

Ironically, in 1952, one of his works had been bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York; there is no doubt that if Kalman had tried to sell them in London, Paris or even in Canada, he would have met with considerably less resistance than he encountered in Manchester. In those early days Kalman was struggling not only to sell Lowry, but any painter. (So) Kalman transferred to Knightsbridge in 1957, having abandoned Manchester where he had not once in ten years been invited into a private home and still felt himself to be regarded as 'a bloody foreigner'.