The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How my friend found Arcadia
John Craxton – the Crete-based, cat-obsessed, pun-loving giant of British art – left a deep impression on all who met him. His paintings will survive us all
How would I describe John Craxton to someone who had never met him? Well, he was tall – well over 6ft, I’d say – and I suppose “gangling” would be a fair description of his physique. He also had a bushy, rather unlikely-looking moustache.
But that question could be answered more meaningfully by looking at his early paintings – those he produced during the 1940s, some of which can be seen in a new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. For there he is. Not, it is true, as you might have seen him in actuality, but as he saw himself. He sits, large-eyed and solitary, sometimes in the moonlight, sometimes half-hidden in the shade of a tree, absorbed by the wonder of the landscape around him. It was these haunted, often undeniably melancholic pictures that led some critics to label him at this stage in his career as a neo-romantic.
John, who died in 2009, aged 87, didn’t like that label – he didn’t like any label – but he grudgingly admitted that what he was looking for in these landscapes was a kind of Arcadia. So, if he had to be labelled, then he would accept “Arcadian”.
In 1946, however, after the end of the Second World War and aged 23, he was able to travel – and he went to Greece: to Poros, to Hydra and eventually to Crete. Suddenly that melancholic young man disappears from his pictures. And his landscapes become positively joyous – the sparkle of the Mediterranean Sea, the shaft of sunshine stabbing through the darkness of the rocky gorge, the wonder of asphodels apparently sprouting from barren rock.
He found his own particular way of expressing delight in these things. Line was, from the beginning, crucially important in his painting. He didn’t care for the smudgings of other styles. He liked to know where an object began and ended. The lines in his early drawings, which he drew with both brush and pen, already had an extraordinary incisiveness and eloquence. But now on Crete they became positively exultant and magically coloured – often astringently so, with a colour sensitivity that was particularly his. And he used these lines and their colours to explain, as he put it, the play of light on contours.
There was an obsessive streak in his character. Cats – in which he found so much entertainment – constantly creep into his pictures. So do goats, which manage to fuel their unquenchable zest for life with a diet consisting largely of thorns. Particular corners of the Cretan landscape fascinated him. He painted one ravine year after year, in different compositions and tonalities, until he finally produced a definitive version, which he greeted with relief having, as he said, at last got it out of his system.
It was on Crete that he learned what he described as a very salutary lesson for a painter – that life is more important than art. Those are his words. And he certainly relished life to the full. He enjoyed riding across Europe between Crete and London on his Triumph Trophy motorcycle. He loved parties, enjoying them in both embassies and village bars with equal gusto. He loved food – particularly eccentric, unusual food. One of my great pleasures in life was to be taken by John to his favourite harbourside restaurant in Chania and be given a dish of boiled sea creatures which even I, who am supposed to have some knowledge of the animal kingdom, found hard to identify.
He had a robust sense of humour and an almost unforgivable taste for puns. He produced a series of linocuts for his Christmas card based on that favourite animal of his – the cat. One showed a cat sitting on a column with the caption “cat-a-pillar”. There were others – which I will leave to your imagination – captioned “cat-astrophe”, “cat-a-pult” and, regrettably, “cat-stration”.
He was intensely musical – not a brilliant executant like his scholarly pianist father Harold, who incidentally gave the first recital in this country of Debussy’s piano music, or his dazzlingly talented oboist sister, Janet. But guided by his instinctive understanding of music, he designed outstandingly successful sets for the Covent Garden ballets Daphnis and Chloë and Apollo. His biographer, Ian Collins, tells how he went to see John in his final illness and found him weeping – not, John explained, because of physical pain, but because of the Shostakovich that was being played in another room.
Those who knew John will, I am sure, have their own particular and much-cherished memories – of his enthusiasms, of his huge laugh, of his generosity and his delight in puncturing pretension. Luckily for all of us, we also have his pictures.