John Craxton; one of the leading artists of the 1940s Neo-Romantic movement
Hyfler/Rosner
John Craxton, who died on November 17 aged 87, was one of
the leading artists of the 1940s Neo-Romantic movement - a
label which he detested throughout his life; although
remaining essentially an English painter, for the past
half-century he had lived an expatriate existence in Greece.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/6599933/John-Craxton.html
(some nice paintings here)
One of six children, and the fourth of five sons, John Leith
Craxton was born on October 3 1922 at St John's Wood,
London, into a highly musical family. His father, Harold
Craxton, was a pianist and Professor of Pianoforte at the
Royal College of Music, his mother, Essie Faulkner, a
violinist; his sister, Janet, was to become an oboist. The
visual arts, however, were represented in his family history
by the 18th-century painter Benjamin West, an ancestor on
his mother's side.
After attending seven different schools, of which the only
one he enjoyed was Betteshanger, near Deal, at 17 John went
to study at the Acad�mie de la Grande Chaumi�re in Paris; on
the outbreak of war he returned to London, enrolling at the
Westminster and then the Central School of Art. By the age
of 19 he was established in a maisonette at Abercorn Place
in St John's Wood, which he shared with another young
artist, Lucian Freud.
The rent on the flat was paid by one of the most influential
patrons of the day, Peter Watson, who owned Horizon
magazine. Watson's friendship was a boon in other ways:
having lived in Paris before the war, he was a source of
first-hand information about the latest developments in the
Continental avant-garde.
Watson also gave the young artists introductions to such
figures as John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Augustus John and
the art historian Kenneth Clark. Clark called on the St
John's Wood flat dressed in tweeds and a country cap, and
was soon giving Craxton and Freud the run of his Hampstead
library as well as buying their pictures.
Because he suffered from pleurisy, in 1941 Craxton was
rejected for military service. Poet in a Landscape (1941),
executed after he heard that he would not be expected to
fight, is typical in its combination of a subject from the
romantic repertoire with disturbingly up-to-date elements. A
youthful figure, based on the artist himself, sits reading
in a field. But the landscape is far from idyllic: instead
it is a threatening tangle of spiky, writhing branches and
enormous, fleshy leaves. Both this drawing and a similar
one, Dreamer in a Landscape, were reproduced in Horizon in
March 1942.
Although in the early 1940s Craxton's style oscillated
rapidly between different influences - and was, to that
extent, immature - it was during this period that he
produced his most intense images. At this time both he and
Freud were fond of using dead animals as models (when Clark
called, there was a dead monkey hidden in their oven). This
enthusiasm was expressed in Freud's Chicken in Basket and
Craxton's Hare in Larder (1943), two memorable, if
disturbing, works.
For Geoffrey Grigson's anthology, The Poet's Eye (1944),
Craxton executed 16 colour lithographs which are widely
regarded as among the finest book illustrations of the
Neo-Romantic movement. In general they sustain the earlier
mood, a point of balance between rustic dream and modernist
nightmare; but some show the effect of the time he had spent
in 1943-44 painting beside Sutherland in Pembrokeshire.
Sutherland's stark influence was strong at this time, but
another attraction was that, according to Peter Watson, west
Wales represented the closest approach in Britain to the
strong light and elemental landscape of the Mediterranean.
As soon as the war was over, Craxton took off for the
Continent. By the end of 1946 he had spent time in France,
where he met Picasso and patronised opium dens (but "did not
inhale"). He had also visited Switzerland, where he
exhibited; Italy, where he smoked a joint with Raymond
Mortimer in Toscanini's private box during the latter's
triumphant return to La Scala; and Greece, a country with
which Craxton fell in love.
In Geoffrey Grigson's monograph John Craxton: Paintings and
Drawings (1948), Craxton is quoted as saying that in postwar
London he felt "like an �migr�... and squashed flat". His
intention, he declared, was to return to Greece as soon as
possible. Years later he explained: "I wanted to put myself
in an alien land and see if my talent would stand it."
Over the next decade Craxton spent much of his time
travelling in southern Europe, first settling on Poros,
where he was visited by his old friend Freud. They sketched
each other and exchanged the drawings as in the old days.
Back in London, Craxton joined his old friend at the gaming
club Aspinalls. Over scrambled eggs and champagne, Freud
told him that, desperate for money, he had sold the drawings
Craxton had given him, adding: "You don't mind, do you?"
Some time later Craxton too found himself strapped for cash,
and was persuaded to sell some Freud drawings. When these
were put up for sale in London, Freud was called upon to
authenticate them. "Craxton is a ----", he wrote on the
back, which did no harm to their value.
In 1960 Craxton finally settled at Hania on the island of
Crete, where his life was by all accounts as idyllic as his
pictures had become. A devotee of Greek music, Byzantine art
and Moto Guzzi motorcycles, he was for many years the
honorary British consul on the island; from time to time he
would be telephoned by the embassy and asked if he could
find a hotel for a visiting dignitary such as the Duke of
Kent, or girls for cocktail parties for the ships that came
in.
From the late 1940s Craxton's favourite subject had been the
sun-baked south, with its sparkling seas, olive trees, goats
and human inhabitants; and his characteristic mood was a
lyric contentment very different from the bleak misanthropy
of many of his contemporaries.
The Tate's Pastoral for PW (Peter Watson) of 1948 is a good
early example of Craxton's mature manner. The subject - a
solitary piper strolling among trees and grazing flocks -
belongs to the world of Virgil's Eclogues; but the paramount
stylistic influences are now Picasso and Mir� (purged,
however, of their violence and savage vitality). The flat,
numinous art of Byzantium also made a deep impression on the
artist.
Craxton painted prolifically throughout his life. He also
designed a ballet, Daphnis et Chlo�, for Frederick Ashton in
1951, and produced the scenery and costumes for Stravinsky's
Apollo at the Royal Opera House in 1968.
Of his many illustrations for the books of Patrick Leigh
Fermor, the most delightful - and the most expressive of the
ardent philhellenism he shared with the author - was the
frontispiece for Mani (1958).
John Craxton was elected a Royal Academician in 1993. His
last London exhibition was at Art First in 2001.
Craxton had his detractors - at the time of his Whitechapel
retrospective in 1967 critics muttered scathingly about
superior "Chelsea restaurant murals".
His unfashionably happy later work may come to be valued
more highly in the future, but it is probably for his early
work that he is likely to be best remembered.
He is survived by his long-term partner, Richard Riley.