DARTMOUTH FIVE


mackerel, acrylic by John Gillo, 2010


ANDRAS KALDOR Andras Kaldor is a man of contradictions. He is an architect who is a painter. His passion is the belle époque of European baroque, or, failing that, of grand historic city houses and terraces, and he lives in a small town that has only one – the Naval College. He paints buildings but never uses a ruler. He is Hungarian and has exhibited and worked in, among other places, New York, Washington, Berlin, Budapest and Paris, but always comes back to Dartmouth.


Kaldor thinks of terraces like musical scores, moving through repeated but not identical architectural motifs, harmony but punctuated with contrasts to give it a dynamic. But then he thinks one can get too esoteric about art and should just enjoy it. Compare The Budapest opera House with what he calls ‘the


stark concrete years of the sixties and seventies’ and you can see why Kaldor gave up architecture – although he stuck at it for twenty years. The tough early times of full- time painting ended when Prince Charles called the proposed extension to the National Gallery ‘a carbuncle’, and Kaldor mounted ‘Carbuncles or masterpieces?’ in a London gallery on historic London buildings and terraces. (He denies England has much proper baroque, but he found a bit.) Commissions followed for more paintings of buildings in London and Wash- ington, and then came European railways and opera houses, com- bining his love of the music of the grand opera and the architecture of opera houses. Turning to art was one of the


Saint Saviour’s Church, watercolour, by Andras Kaldor, 1986


dodgy times in Kaldor’s life. But the dodgiest, he says, was when he left Hungary at seventeen as Russian tanks were rolling in on the revolution of 1956. Once safely in Vienna he organised travel to England, and found a place at Edinburgh University to study architecture. His architectural career in London and Yorkshire brought him to Plymouth and sailing the coast to Dartmouth.


The Opera House, Budapest, ink and gouache, by Andras Kaldor, 1988


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