John Craxton liked to paint goats, an animal he vaguely resembled. Picture one, its hooves balanced precariously on a Mediterranean hillside, surviving on next to nothing, but utterly free to roam: this was Craxton, who left postwar Britain for Greece, where he lived in perfect contentment on little more than sunshine and sea urchins. Light was what he craved, and the rest, somehow, would always take care of itself. Only rarely did he trouble to sell his work; when it came to materials, he used whatever was near at hand. Five Goats (1959), in which the exuberant beasts in question might almost be cartwheeling in the Cretan dust, was painted in tempera with additional help from some Polyfilla, bought originally to plug the holes in the walls of his ancient home.
At Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, the city where he was once a chorister, you can see 100 works by Craxton (as well as many goats) in a retrospective its curator, Ian Collins, has subtitled A Modern Odyssey. And so it is – an odyssey, I mean. It’s not only that the artist, enthralled from boyhood by folklore and legend, loved to have adventures, the sea there to be crossed; for the visitor, too, this exhibition is experienced as a journey. Like the weather on the day I visited, the first few pictures are inertly sludgy: the colour of hangovers and damp leaves. But once Craxton sets sail, travelling first to the Isles of Scilly, and then, in 1946, to Greece – thereafter, he visited it every year, finally buying a house in Chania in 1962 – a light clicks on, suffusing every room with its warmth. I already knew him for a romantic, his earliest influences William Blake and Samuel Palmer, all tree roots and bowered lanes. In this exhibition, however, it’s the sybarite in Craxton that takes centre stage, his chest bare, his shoulders dusted with sand. An azure sea, a plate of rose-pink prawns, a couple of handsome young mariners: how he loved life, as well as art.
He was born in London in 1922, one of the six children of Harold Craxton, a pianist who’d made unexpected money from a hit song, Mavis, and Essie Faulkner, a violinist. The Craxtons were easygoing, even a little bohemian, which in the case of John was probably just as well: their son left school with no formal qualifications, and would never attend art college. Having failed his army medical in 1941 – he had undiagnosed tuberculosis – his artistic education was roundabout. Peter Watson, the wealthy proprietor of Horizon magazine, took him up, installing him in a flat with Lucian Freud, and introducing him to Graham Sutherland, his mentor. Craxton and Freud got the dead animals they painted together from a Camden pet shop; a putrid donkey was hidden in the oven during a visit to their flat by Kenneth Clark. Sutherland, meanwhile, taught him that merely replicating nature was not enough; a “new reality” required invention, too. But then, the times were kinder all round to artists – whether you had contacts or not. Craxton could live like a king for a week on a fiver, and usually survived on much less. In 1942 he picked up a colour print by William Blake – Satan Exulting Over Eve, now in the collection of the Tate – for just £15.
The exhibition is chronological, and as the years tick by, we watch Craxton bloom. Released from sodden, exhausted England, his gaze turns outwards, introspection banished at last. He paints those he meets: mostly, but not exclusively, men (Craxton was a gay man who loved women; among his lovers was, briefly, Margot Fonteyn). Head of Aged Cretan (1948) reveals the influence of Picasso, whom he had met in Paris two years before, but the jauntiness is all his own. His people are so marvellously animated, whether they’re selling octopus (Fish Market, Poros, 1952), carousing after hours (Man Dancing in a Taverna, 1954), or even just having a siesta (Boy Sleeping, 1950). When he does paint landscapes, his colours are unreal: luxuriant hallucinations that recall not only ancient mosaics but glossy package tour brochures; highly stylised images that speak of fun and ouzo.
The writer Edmund White, who knew Craxton, has said that he enjoyed himself too much ever to be considered ambitious, or even hardworking. But whether driven or not, he was always busy, productive in his own way. In this show, we see the jackets he designed for the books of his friend and fellow traveller Paddy Leigh Fermor; the sets he painted for Frederick Ashton’s 1951 production of Daphnis and Chloe at the Royal Opera House; the ceramics on which he collaborated in the 1970s with the potter Ann Stokes during his decade-long exile from Greece under its military dictatorship. He can turn his hand to anything.
His work is not, and never has been, precisely to my taste; its woozy, decorative aspects bring to mind the pictures, often made of string, in the suburban houses where I babysat as a teenager. But displayed en masse and with such conviction, as it is at Pallant House, it’s irresistible in the moment. In Still Life Sailors (1980-85), three suntanned men in white bell bottoms eat lunch at a restaurant. Generous and uncomplicated, this is a painting whose only message is to urge you to down tools. A bowl of anchovies, some fried potatoes, a bottle of retsina: here is the good life, salt on the lips as well as in the air.
