![]() “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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