In late April 1992, I was in Crete, interviewing the painter John Craxton. It was the week that Francis Bacon died. We heard the news on the BBC World service, and afterwards Craxton reminisced about his old friend. Craxton himself at that stage had almost disappeared into obscurity. He was living in a elegantly crumbly building overlooking the harbour at Chania. It wasn’t grand, but there was a small Matisse cut-out hanging on his sitting-room wall.
In recent years Craxton has been undergoing a minor revival. There has been a book, a show at the Fitzwilliam; now this sizable exhibition — Charmed lives in Greece — devoted to him, together with the Greek painter Niko Ghika (Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, 1906–1994), and the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.
The works on show do indeed have a lot of charm, as Craxton did himself, but the title raises another question. Was his life charmed in another sense? He lived in Greece on and off for decades, and settled more or less permanently in Crete in 1970. In the book accompanying the exhibition, Craxton’s biographer, Ian Collins, notes that in his later years a large black canvas generally sat on his easel, ‘apparently as a deterrence to further labour’. Had Craxton wandered into the land of the Lotus-eaters, which the sailors in The Odyssey found ‘was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home’?
During the war — a period not covered by this exhibition — Craxton (1922–2009), was one of the most successful of the group of artists dubbed ‘neo-romantic’, a term he detested. At 19 he was sharing a house with the equally youthful Lucian Freud, each of them working on a different floor. He must then have seemed one of the coming forces in British painting.
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