Biography
Gallery One was an experimental and pioneering contemporary art gallery run by the poet and art dealer Victor Musgrave (1919-1984). It opened in 1953, at 1 Litchfield Street, just off the Charing Cross Road in central London and shared the space with the photographic studio of Ida Kar (1908-1974), Musgrave’s wife from 1945, which was on the upper floor. After a short while, it moved to 20 D’Arblay Street in Soho and then to Mayfair, an area more traditionally associated with commercial art galleries.
Across all three locations, Gallery One offered a place for artists not only to exhibit their work but to hang out and meet one another; it was a social space and gathering point for London’s creative community. Because Musgrave was known as a writer and poet, as well an art dealer, it attracted a wide and interesting circle. One young man in his early twenties drawn into Gallery One’s orbit and given a job in 1956 for two years was John Kasmin (b. 1934). 'Kas' would become a legendary dealer and gallerist in his own right in the 1960s.
The show Seven Indian Painters in Europe, 1958 was one of the most significant works at Gallery One and was critically acclaimed. The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection (MKOAC), brought together by curator Monika Kinley and Victor Musgrave over a period of 30 years (1979-2010) amassing 1153 individual artworks by over 129 artists and originally on loan for ten years to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, was given to The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, facilitated by the Contemporary Art Society in 2010.
