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Andras
Kaldor: Masterpieces or Carburicles? London Contemporary Art, 132 Lots
Rd., "I paint them because I like them" he told me. He was born in Hungary, escaped as a child in the 1956 revolution, trained and practised as an architect in Britain, till in 1980 he decided to escape from that too, and become a full-time painter. 1 am glad he did, because there aren't many artists today who can portray our buildings, good bad and in-different, with such sympathy and style. He gave up using a ruler many years back, he found them stultifying, and when you see the suppleness of his straight lines, the almost parallels of the titles on the rooves, or the near verticals of the cast iron railings in front, you can see that his type of accurate visual memory is much nearer what the eye sees, and, (more to the point), erdoys, than a ruled, mechanical replica could achieve. His medium is usually gouache, often defined with a painstaking but never pedantic mapping pen and ink. His masterworks, in my view, are whole streets and sides of squares: he has seductively portrayed the West side of Church Row, Hampstead, and the West side of Berkeley Square with the house where Clive of ..... |
India
committed sucide, and the house where today Maggs sell
rare books from rare Georgian rooms. He knows the correct
window proportions, the customary floor to ceiling
measurements, from his long experience as architect, and
he establishes the basic layout by taking a few photos
and writing on his sketch, the number of window apertures
or railing divisions. 1 think, des-pite his working from
memory more than from measurements, it is a miracle he
has not been run over when stepping backwards off the
pavement to get a better view; it is very difficult to
recreate a whole terrace in the mind's eye, yet this is
his remarkable and pleasing achievement. Another winning attribute, is the breadth of his taste: (he is no Prince Charles, dislik-ing anything which looks new). He has, indeed, found a detailed view of the Lloyd's Building in the City, which really does jus-tice to its superb originality and colour and soaring lines, despite its congested situation in the narrow medieval streets. Nor is Andras simply a docile modernist: he has a weakness, which 1 seldom share, for fat beefy Edwardian Baroque like the Brompton Oratory in Brompton Road (he makes it look rather like a real Baroque dome: under his brush, it even may remind you of the Fischer von Erlich masterpiece, the Karlskirche in Vienna). Perhaps most unexpected, because least noticed now-adays and the most complicated in detail in the whole show, is the Gothic Revival sum-ptuous facade of the Russell Hotel in Russell Square. St. Pancras station looks plain in comparison! He places the Russell in the dreamland of Flanders, dubbing it a cousin of the wool exchange in Ypres or Arras; horizontal rhythm and soaring verticals. What perserverance and patience, to render the suggestion of such a myriad exotic mouldings and pinnacles and fretted railings! Andras never loses the bones of his build-ings, however, beneath his details, and here his architectural gift shows its rare worth: the big vision of the whole always dom-inates the little superficial charms, and so his work achieves a rare dignity and distinc-tion, so different from the trivial neo-Georgian fakes of our fashionable city dev-elopers today. Incidentally, Chelsea Harbour, one of the bigger Marina develop-ments, is now almost complete, and makes a fascinating close-by postcript to a visit to this fine new gallery. (See colour illustration p.155. Mar 1 to 15. Another distinguished show of architectural drawings by Brendan Neiland and Ben Johnson, is at the RIBA to Mar 17, and will be reviewed in our next issue) GRAHAM HUGHES |
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