Gifts from the Greeks

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John Craxton

By Ian Collins

John Craxton was one of the English painters who grew up during the Second World War. He inherited the usual twin problems of young painters in our time, namely, what is to be said and how is one to say it? The continuous crashing of successive revolutionary waves for the preceding 100 years meant that ‘Make It New’ was an imperative, not helped by nearly six wartime years cut off from the continental mainstream.

Craxton was born in 1922 into a musical London family with connections to any number of creative people, which meant continuous personal advantage. He was lucky enough at 14 to visit Paris and see Picasso's Guernica, and was back studying drawing in Paris just before the war broke out. During the war he drew and painted what became known as Neo-Romantic landscapes, derived from Samuel Palmer and from Cubism as mediated by Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Getting to know Sutherland, he spent time working alongside him in Pembrokeshire.

Aged 21, he had a show at the Leicester Galleries (1944) and sold more than 30 paintings. Five more exhibitions followed at this location, the last in 1966. He shared studios, still life objects, dead animals, and sometimes even sheets of paper, with Lucian Freud. His work appeared in Penguin New Writing 32 (1947), and his photographic portrait, along with those of Medley, Minton, Colquhoun, Macbryde, Vaughan, Freud and Rosoman (‘Portraits Of Contemporary British Painters’) in issue number 35 (1948). He said:

There were two groups during the war: the artists around John Lehmann andPenguin New Writing, such as Michael Ayrton, John Minton and Keith Vaughan, and then on the other side, with Peter Watson and Horizon, there was Lucian and myself, Sutherland, Colquhoun and Macbryde.

In 1946, almost by accident, Craxton went to Greece and started painting in Poros, joined for a while by Freud; eventually he made in a home in Crete, overlooking the harbour in  Hania. This was the promised land: the spikey shapes constantly imposed on his early English pictures were naturally present here: he replaced the imaginary shepherds of his early English landscapes with real (but increasingly idealized) Greek shepherds. Likewise, dark skies and gloom were replaced by the blazing sunlight and jewelled colours of the Mediterranean. 

The idealization may have been entirely willed: in the early 1950s he wrote: ‘I feel a very strong desire to experience a sort of catharsis: to be forced to turn away from painting private pictures and to make for more universal values’.  Yet the later pictures are generalized: with one or two exceptions the figures become types rather than specific individuals. The paintings of the second half of the '40s are the most charged, and they were as exciting to me as a young painter then – even in Penguin New Writing's soft black and white – as the Sutherland and Nash to which he also looked back.

This monograph is very welcome: it handsomely illustrates the work, and provides a chronology and much information. More could have been said about the interaction between Craxton and Freud when their pictures were consciously using distortion, and before Freud travelled down a very different, puritanical, path towards Rubens and squalor. One can imagine how they drifted apart: it would be nice to have more evidence, especially about their painting. What was actually said when ‘Craxton commented unfavourably on Freud's Large Interior, Paddington’ at the time of their final rift?

Rather more importantly, while Nikos Ghika (a Greek painter friend who worked on the island of Hydra, where Craxton stayed with him) is mentioned in the text, he is only represented visually by a portrait by the young Craxton in 1949. A couple of Ghika's landscapes would have made clear the great debt Craxton owed to him stylistically. He had described Ghika's work as ‘revitalised Cubism’. Whether or not Cubism needed revitalizing, Ghika certainly developed a language for describing the Greek landscape, which derived from the Paris in which he had lived from 1922 to ’34, and Craxton made plentiful use of this language once he had absorbed it. Unfortunately, as it seems to me, the convincing spatial organization of his 1940s paintings, using Cubist devices, dwindles to decorative arabesques in much of the later work.

Collins' monograph is divided into two parts: the first covers 24 early years and the second part, covering the subsequent 63 years, is entitled 'Life Even More Than Art,' This division is in itself a kind of critical judgement. In the end Wyndham Lewis'  remarkably mild (for him) 1949 judgement on Craxton's art turned out to be not far from the truth:  ‘A pretty tinted cocktail that is good, but does not kick hard enough’.

John Craxton  by Ian Collins is published by Lund Humphries, 2011. 186pp., 179 colour and 47mono illus, £35.00.  ISBN 978-1-84822-069-0