In the winter of 1949, Andras Kalman opened a gallery in a basement air-raid shelter in South King Street, Manchester, 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.’)
In celebration of a 70-year relationship between Andras Kalman and the art of L.S Lowry, the exhibition L.S. Lowry R.A. (1877 – 1976) opens at Crane Kalman Gallery this Thursday 20th October (Invite only) then continues 10th December 2022
About the artist
Lowry was born in Old Trafford, Manchester, in November 1887. In 1904 he left school and attended the private painting classes of William Fitz in Moss Side. From 1905 to 1915, he studied drawing and painting at the Municipal College of Art in Manchester.
In 1918 Lowry was accepted for life-classes at the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts and in 1920 he attended classes at the Salford School of Art. In 1919 he had three of his works accepted at the annual exhibition of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts.
Lowry’s work was first shown by the Crane Gallery in 1952 when the gallery was still in Manchester. Lowry is famous for his scenes of industrial life. This interest first developed in 1912 when he saw a play with industrialist subject matter called Hindle Wakes by Stanley Houghton. Although Lowry is most famous for his bustling, colourful scenes in which crowds of human beings interact with one another against an industrial backdrop, he also produced some paintings which are imbued with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. This was probably the result of Lowry’s increasingly solitary lifestyle – for many years Lowry worked as a rent collector by day and painted by night, whilst also caring for his widowed invalid mother. Lowry’s mother died in 1939, from which time he lived entirely alone. In 1968, Andras Kalman, who knew Lowry personally, organised an exhibition entitled ‘The Loneliness of L. S. Lowry’, showing only portraits and seascapes and landscapes in which not one human figure features. The same theme was explored again in an exhibition of the same name at Abbott Hall Art Gallery in 2010 which was produced in close collaboration with Crane Kalman.
In 2013 Tate Britain produced a major exhibition of Lowry’s work, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life. The following year The Art Museum of Najing University in China held a solo show of his work. Two films have been made about Lowry’s life. The first, a documentary with Ian Mackellen entitled Looking for Lowry was released in 2011 and the second, Mrs Lowry and Son, a drama featuring Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave was released in 2019.
