Artist Info
Mel Calman
Mel Calman (13 May 1931- 10 February 1994), cartoonist, writer and dealer.
Educated at the Perse School, Cambridge, and then went first to the Borough Polytechnic Arts School and afterwards to St Martin's School of Art, where he studied illustration.
In 1956 Calman became a freelance cartoonist. His drawings started appearing in the Daily Express and from there he went on to draw for the Observer, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, the Times, and the Evening Standard; to become the resident cartoonist on BBC TV's Tonight programme, to illustrate books, to design advertisements, notably for Shell, and to have his cartoons syndicated all over the US.
As well as cartooning, Calman was an art dealer, founding in 1970 The Workshop, which later became the Cartoon Gallery, now based in Museum Street, opposite the British Museum.
A stream of collections of his own drawings were published, starting with Through the Telephone Directory (1962) and including This Pestered Isle (1973) and Modern Times (1988). His 1986 autobiography is called What Else Do You Do?