John Kasmin

John Kasmin (born as John Kaye on 24 September 1934) is a British art dealer and collector, also known as "Kas".

Early life John Kasmin was born John Kaye in Whitechapel, in 1934. He was initially paid a half a crown (12½p) a day. He had a sexual encounter with Ida Kar, wife of Musgrave, without objection of his employer.

In 1960, he met David Hockney who, when Kasmin set up his own gallery in 1963, became one of his first artists. (Kasmin appears, as himself, in the 1974 Hockney biopic, A Bigger Splash).

Other artists that Kasmin showed included Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Anthony Caro, William G. Tucker, John Latham, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Robin Denny, Howard Hodgkin and Gillian Ayres.

Kasmin opened a large white space on 118 New Bond Street that was unusual for the time, as until then most commercial galleries had been domestic in scale. Kasmin closed his gallery in 1972 but continued to operate in partnership with other London dealers into the 1990s. Kasmin's son Paul Kasmin opened the Kasmin Gallery in New York City in 1989.