At the glacier (around 1910)

He studied painting at the famous private school of Simon Hollósy in Munich, where he also participated in exhibitions. Between 1907 and 1911 he attended the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts. From then on, he often exhibited his small-scale prints and applied graphic works at exhibitions in Hungary. In 1912 he went to Venice on a state scholarship. In the same year he founded the Young Artists' Association. In 1914 he participated in the American exhibition tour of Hungarian graphic artists. Two years later, the St. George's Guild in Budapest organized Tichy's first collective exhibition with great success, together with his brother Gyula. From 1918 he was a member of the Kéve artists' association. 

Like his brother, Kálmán Tichy was fascinated by fairy tales and fantasy, but he was more attracted to folk tales and children's stories. In addition to the world of fairy tales, his early prints were influenced by English and Viennese Art Nouveau (Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt) and, as Károly Lyka writes, 'modern German symbolism'. He always recorded the memories of his travels (Venice, the Dalmatian coast, the Carpathians, etc.) and wove local landscapes into his narrative world. This is why the relationship between landscape and man is a more important factor in his work than in that of his brother. In his watercolour Glacier, the Art Nouveau lines are evident, while the use of colour, the subtle sense of depth created by the various lines and the blurring of the figure against the landscape are evidence of the influence of Japanese woodcuts. While the depths and heights of the wanderer with his back to the viewer and the landscape unfolding before him is a pictorial type (also found in other works by Tichy, such as Waterfall) that could also be a reference to Caspar David Friedrich's romantic painting Wanderer over the Sea of Fog (1818).