Craxton silences his critics
For a while, in the early Forties, the British artist John Craxton painted and drew very much like his friend, Lucian Freud. After the war, when he lived and worked in Greece, his range of references, like many great artists before and after, expanded – in his case from Byzantium to Picasso. But his distance from the British art world meant that on his return, at a retrospective exhibition in 1967, he was pigeonholed by unfamiliar critics as a “decorative” and “derivative” artist. These criticisms have resurfaced in response to the British Museum’s current exhibition, Charmed Lives in Greece, in which Craxton has a lead role. But, in the catalogue to a different show about Craxton’s work in Greece opening at the Osborne Samuel Gallery in Mayfair this week, the former Tate curator Richard Morphet emphasises how the artist “forged an expression that was uniquely his own”. The more Craxton you see, the more you recognise what Morphet calls the artist’s “distinctive visual language”. The market has understood this for over a decade since Craxton prices first exceeded £100,000 at auction. That record now stands at £277,000; and at Osborne Samuel, where prices range from £9,000 to £350,000, 20 exhibits have already been sold before the show opens.