Swallows on the nest, a black cat at the gate, swifts hunting in a bright sky over the island of Crete. Ancient sculptures of gods, bulls and men, and a pair of sculpted breasts, their shape echoed in the hilltops. Tacita Dean’s new film, Crackers, takes as its title both the nickname of the artist John Craxton, whose memory inspired it, and the improvised circumstances of the film’s making, with its happy accidents and unexpected detours.
The filming of Crackers was a sentimental journey. In 1982, when she was 16, Dean’s family took a holiday to the island, finding themselves staying opposite John Craxton’s home in the city of Chania. Craxton was the first artist Dean had ever met, and visiting his studio affirmed her ambition, much against the wishes of her parents, to become an artist. It was the life Craxton had, as much as his work, that inspired her.
Dean’s eight-and-a-half-minute long, 16mm film diptych, filmed in Chania and projected quite small on the wall, accompanies Craxton’s A Modern Odyssey at Pallant House, Chichester, which takes us through the entirety of Craxton’s career, from early neo-Romantic drawings and paintings to his later, light-filled scenes of life in Greece, via numerous book jacket illustrations and film of a revival of the ballet Daphnis et Chloé at the Royal Opera House.
Frederick Ashton’s 1951 production commissioned set designs from Craxton, who painted them himself. Craxton’s early friendship with Lucian Freud (which foundered, as many of Freud’s friendships did), and their drawings and paintings of one another, as well as the works Craxton made under the mentorship of Graham Sutherland, are also on show in an exhibition that is part of a more general revival of interest in this gay artist who went his own way, and who died aged 87, in 2009.
Dean’s film is a series of brief encounters with places and objects, like pages from a scrapbook. The city’s cats, the old Venetian harbour and lighthouse, a glass on a cafe table drenched in rain, a room with a chandelier and pictures on the walls, are all re-encounters with the late artist and the things that captivated him. Craxton told Dean that a drawing she’d shown him had “linear confidence”, a phrase that has stayed with her, and which might just as well be said of Craxton’s own art.
Critics have often complained that Craxton valued life over art, implying that he should have worked harder or suffered more, and that he wasn’t unhappy enough to be a better artist. None of this would be said if Craxton were considered a major figure in 20th-century British art. For a long time he was regarded as an English neo-Romantic who had escaped the dinge of postwar England, with its repressive, stifling intolerance of homosexuality, in 1946, to become an interesting, louche and talented footnote, settling too far away to make the most of his talents and a career.
Poor guy, who went off to live the life on the island of Crete, enjoying the sunsets, the play of light on water and the long taverna lunches. But if Craxton had been more prolific, more ambitious in his art and less distracted by the attractions of the island, he wouldn’t have made the art he did, which at its best is full of pleasure and vitality. As it was, Craxton became a Royal Academician and an honorary consul in Chania, had an unlikely affair with Margot Fonteyn, and held a retrospective at London’s Whitechapel in 1967, which was not received well by critics.
Even in his paintings, Craxton’s art is essentially graphic, whatever its subject, always underpinned by the linear confidence of his own drawing, whether he is painting dizzying, fractured light on rippled water and on quivering foliage, or light glancing down the sides of a gorge, or scattering around the silhouette of a backlit young man on the shore. Craxton orchestrates all this retinal disturbance in his later paintings. Even when he paints the intensity of light, his skills are primarily graphic. One later painting – his 1988 Cat, Tree and Bird – has a hallucinatory, fractal quality, as if it were a rejoinder, across the years, to neo-Romanticism’s gnarly metaphors of tortured tree-limbs, sodden hedgerows, thorny thickets and old hermits among the yews.
While neo-Romanticism teetered into what in the early 1950s was dubbed the “geometry of fear” school of existential dread, Craxton’s art embraced both everyday life on a Greek island and the persistence of myth. He came to think of himself as an Arcadian, which is a lot better than being pigeonholed as a neo-Romantic. Some of his peers who stayed in London either died young (like John Minton), or their careers foundered in drink and depression. Freud, of course, went on and on, and never forgot a grievance, real or imaginary. Give me the taverna lunches and the ouzo, the dancing and the drunken sailors any day, over the miserable rounds of the Colony Room and the French House, the fag-ends of London’s 1950s Bohemia dragged too far towards the century’s end.
There are great 1940s drawings of a dead goose and a dead hare (both look ready for skinning and the table) here, and an English willow that Craxton wished were an olive tree growing amid ancient ruins. Even before ever setting a foot in the Aegean, Craxton turned a Breton fisherman he saw on the Scilly Isles into a Greek fisherman. Scilly, which Craxton visited with Freud, was already a stand-in for a Greek island. It became all Greek to Craxton, even before his first visit in 1946.
When he wanted to be, Craxton was good at the well-observed. A face, a goat in a tree, a butcher smoking and lounging in his shop – he could imbue them all with a sort of timelessness. Three uniformed sailors share a meal in a taverna. The table is a friendly clutter of plates of seafood, salad and fish, halved lemons, a plastic cruet, Bic lighters and a pack of cigarettes. Forks reach across the table and glasses are raised. The whole scene is unselfconscious. Two of the diners are intent on food and drink and conversation, while one sailor is momentarily lost in thought. Craxton captures this lively, animated scene, and stills it. It isn’t a great painting but its reality is palpable. So successful is it, Craxton painted two versions (though only one is here). This timeless scene makes me think of film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s collisions between the present and an ancient, mythological past.
From the 1950s onwards Craxton didn’t develop much, although his paintings got bigger. He was, writes Edmund White, who got to know Craxton in Chania in the late 1980s, “forever young”, enjoying life and never going easy on the ouzo. For a long time, he would travel back and forth from London to Greece on his motorcycle. His paintings were always well-crafted, though their vitality sometimes feels a bit strained. But even the best artists sometimes have to fake it. Derek Jarman wanted to film him, but Craxton thought there were bound to be scenes of dancing sailors, and he demurred. He didn’t want Tacita Dean to film him, either. She has made a number of films of artists in their old age, including Cy Twombly, David Hockney and Merce Cunningham.
Crackers is a kind of portrait whose subject is missing, but not exactly absent. Not all the art we value has to be the best.
• At Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 21 April 2024
