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INTERVIEW


By the Dart INTERVIEW


ANDRAS KALDOR


ESCAPE TO ART AND ARCHITECTURE


By Phil Scoble A


ndras Kaldor sits at his easel in his Newcomen Road gallery and smiles – he has a


relaxed air that puts me at my ease. Andras is one of the famous


‘Dartmouth Five’ – the artists based in Dartmouth in the early 1980s who put the town on the artistic map – along with Simon Drew, John Gillo, John Donaldson and Paul Riley. he seems gratified and puzzled by


my interest in his early life: “Oh, so you want to know about that?!” Well, yes, Andras, I am interested


in you escaping from your Budapest home at the age of 17 in the face of advancing Russian tanks, stealing under barbed wire in the dead of night and fleeing into austria. 1956 was a time of great upheaval


Bayards Cove by Andras Kaldor


in his home country –with first a revolution and the Russians leaving, then coming back and retaking control with overwhelming force. Soon the president, along with hundreds of revolutionaries, had been shot and buried in unmarked graves


Andras had been part of the Hungarian Basketball Youth team that had toured much of Eastern Europe


and a hard line puppet government was in place. Andras had been part of the


Hungarian Basketball Youth team that had toured much of Eastern Europe


earlier that year, and he had gained both a taste for travel and an urge not to serve under a totalitarian government. The decision was not easy: he left behind his parents and sister, not knowing if he would ever see them again. In the end it would be more than a decade before he could travel back to meet up with them. “I went with a friend and on the


way we met up with a family as we made our way across ploughed fields, trying to avoid the observation towers and their guards on the border,” he said. “When we thought we had walked far enough to be in austria we came across a flagpole – it was so dark we couldn’t see if it was an Austrian or Hungarian flag, which are only one colour different - Austria is red, white, red, and Hungary red, white, green. In the dark we couldn’t tell what colour was the final band! We sent the young son of the family we were with up the flagpole to see what country we were in, and it turned out it was red and we were in Austria, with the Iron Curtain behind us. “the austrians were magnificent:


they organised buses to pick up the refugees who were crossing the border and took them to Vienna. From there we arranged to get to Britain and I got off the train at Victoria Station to be met by a pretty girl with red hair and a bicycle. She was the daughter of the family I stayed with for my first few weeks, as I started my intensive English lessons!”


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