![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Despite any sign of his being involved, the island’s town council, until recently, refused to even consider naming a street after him, an honour given to Freud and other illustrious visitors. For years resentments lingered over his suspected role in foiling a plot that, hatched on Poros, would have seen a boat deliver arms to Greek Cypriots heading the nascent anti-colonial struggle against the British. Throughout his life, Craxton, who was also attracted to women and famously involved with the dancer Margot Fonteyn, made light of his sexuality.īut in 1955 when Anglo-Greek ties were unusually strained during the Cyprus emergency, the artist also raised suspicion. Accusations of espionage and of hoarding illegal antiquities – made, embarrassingly, during his time as Britain’s honorary consul in Chania – haunted him.Īlmost from the day he first arrived in the country at the age of 23, flying in on a borrowed bomber with the art-loving wife of the then British ambassador to Athens, the artist sought out military personnel: soldiers and sailors whom he often painted.įor a man escaping the strictures of 1950s England, where homosexuality would not be legalised, even in private, until he had turned 45, such companionships were part of the unabashed freedom to be enjoyed in the Aegean. “It brought the most radiant smile to John’s face.”Ĭraxton’s relationship with Greece could also be fraught. “The doctor, an art lover who was being paid with a picture, shot back: ‘Who is Lucian Freud?’ ” he recalls. Photograph: Nicholas MooreĬollins, a friend, recollects how even towards the end of his life, as he awoke in a hospital bed following a bout of ill health, Craxton’s primary concern was whether the prognosis would allow him to outlive Freud. John Craxton in the White mountains of Crete, in 1984. It was a preoccupation that matched the initial intensity of a bond that included the two bohemians larking about on the fabled couch of Freud’s grandfather, Sigmund, after the psychoanalyst, fleeing the spectre of Nazi terror, left Vienna for London sharing a studio off Abbey Road and raucous moments in London’s Soho district during the blitz, before Freud followed Craxton to Poros in the late 1940s, where both spent months painting and drawing one another. The upset followed him like a great dark cloud, at times bordering on obsession. “Now both are seen as great 20 th-century painters and this tour is proving Craxton’s immense popularity.”įrom his mid-50s, up until his death in London at the age of 87, Craxton remained troubled and hurt by the way their relationship derailed, starting with his criticism of a Freud painting. “Until recently, it would have been impossible for the art world to mention John and Lucian in the same sentence,” says Ian Collins, whose acclaimed biography of the artist, A Life of Gifts, which explores the intense and complicated friendship between the two, is published in paperback this week. And the response has been overwhelming.Ī century and six months after his birth, nearly 14 years after his death and 70 after he first luxuriated in the light of Greece, the artist has finally won the acknowledgement that his admirers believe is long overdue: recognition that Craxton, who described himself as a “kind of Arcadian”, preferring friends to own his pictures, shunned for much of his life. But a series of retrospectives in Athens, his beloved Chania – the Venetian port town in Crete where he long had a home – and now Istanbul, have sought to redress that oversight. ![]()
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