Fame finally calls for British painter John Craxton, friend of Lucian Freud and lover of all things

Shows in Athens and Istanbul have brought belated recognition for an artist long championed by David Attenborough. But why, 14 years after his death, is London still immune to his talents?

He was louche, larger than life, a lover of all things Hellenic and in his early years on the London art scene inseparable from the equally rakish Lucian Freud.

For decades John Craxton, viewed as a giant in the pantheon of painters of modern Greece, an unrivalled portraitist of the country he would come to adopt, languished in relative obscurity. What the sun did for him in conveying joy in colour, the arbiters of taste in the art world of the grey of England preferred to ignore.

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. And the response has been overwhelming.

A 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.

“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. “Now both are seen as great 20th-century painters and this tour is proving Craxton’s immense popularity.”

From 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. The upset followed him like a great dark cloud, at times bordering on obsession.

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.

Collins, 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. “The doctor, an art lover who was being paid with a picture, shot back: ‘Who is Lucian Freud?’” he recalls. “It brought the most radiant smile to John’s face.”

Craxton’s relationship with Greece could also be fraught. Accusations of espionage and of hoarding illegal antiquities – made, embarrassingly, during his time as Britain’s honorary consul in Chania – haunted him.

Almost 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.

For 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. Throughout his life, Craxton, who was also attracted to women and famously involved with the dancer Margot Fonteyn, made light of his sexuality.

But in 1955 when Anglo-Greek ties were unusually strained during the Cyprus emergency, the artist also raised suspicion. 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. 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.

Later, he would be forced into exile during the colonels’ regime: army officers who immediately banned the Beatles and miniskirts when in 1967 they plunged Greece into seven dark years of military rule.

An unabashed hedonist who never passed an examination in his life including art – with the single exception of the test to drive his cherished motorbikes – Craxton lived high and low, moving seamlessly from the charmed circles Fonteyn had first brought him into, to the tavernas where ordinary folk congregated.

It was the latter he preferred to paint – along with cats and goats. “Going to Greece after the war he was able to relax, and be relaxed,” says Richard Riley, the painter’s long-time partner. “He loved people, he loved going off to the villages and drawing.”

As in England, Craxton was well connected in Greece, spending Orthodox Easter – a feast the country celebrates this weekend– every year with the Mitsotakis family who hail from Chania and whose youngest member, Kyriakos, like his father, is now prime minister. The leader was among the thousands to visit the exhibitions in Athens and Crete.

It wasn’t until 1976 that he would return to Chania in the wake of the colonels losing power. Exile had not been all bad. It had thrown him into a period of intense creativity and would lead to an enduring friendship with Sir David Attenborough who, spotting a Lanzarote landscape painted by Craxton in a gallery on the Fulham Road, bought the piece instantly. The naturalist now has more of his works than anyone else in the UK.

“One of my great pleasures in life was to be taken by John to his favourite harbourside restaurant in Chania,” Attenborough says in A Life of Gifts, “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.”

It was Craxton’s love of life that would infuse his art and, predominant among the painters who have made Greece their home, ultimately help him capture the country so well. The 200 works on display in Istanbul’s Drawn to Light exhibition – the biggest show of his art to date – were executed mostly in his studio in Crete. Many convey scenes of unalloyed ebullience in the sun.

“He was a master of expressing light and space on canvas,” says Tomas Watson, a British painter, whose work, like Craxton’s, has been inspired by Greece where he too has lived for more than 30 years. “What’s so interesting was how he absorbed influences like Picasso and Samuel Palmer and then transformed them into his own vision of the Mediterranean where we see sheep, for example, turned into goats.”

It has not been lost in Greece that 44 of the pieces exhibited in Istanbul belong to Ömer Koç, the billionaire Turkish businessman who has amassed more of Craxton’s works than anyone else alive.

For years Craxton was known, if at all, by the book jackets he illustrated for Patrick Leigh Fermor, the war hero and travel writer whose work helped cement Anglo-Greek cultural ties.

“John would have loved the recognition,” says Riley, “but I also think he would have appreciated it more had there been a major show in London. For reasons many of us will never understand, there has been a lack of recognition of his work in the UK.”

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