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拍品专文
In 1947 John Craxton, then based on the island of Poros, paid a first visit to Crete. He went to see the palace of King Minos at Knossos, the birthplace of El Greco and a butcher in Herákleion market.
The butcher had been a star turn in the tavernas of Poros during National Service in the Greek Navy, dancing the zeibékiko with its climax of a backward somersault over an upturned chair. The performance, repeated in a bar near the Minoan palace, gave Craxton a strange pang of familiarity. Soon he recognised a folk survival dating back 3,350 years to the bull-leapers in a Knossos fresco.
In 1948 he returned to trek into the White Mountains of western Crete to trace Cretan Resistance comrades of his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor. He stayed so long that smart friends in Athens, who had warned against visiting what they saw as the Wild West of their country, where lethal blood feuds only paused for bigger war-time battles, reported him missing and possibly murdered. He had just gone joyously and riotously native.
Between those two trips, in a spell of elated industry on Poros, Craxton painted this magnificent picture, plus the smaller works Shepherds near Knossos and Galatas. Artistically and personally he found his home on turning 25.
While his post-Cubist painterly language in Farm Yard still derives from Picasso, echoing earlier scenes of Pembrokeshire and the Scillies, he is finding himself in the light, life, landscape and legends of Greece. His elongated figures link to El Greco. The woman carries an amphora – classic ceramic container for wine, oil or water – that might be Minoan. The girl both runs with blithe abandon and dashes to dislodge a goat rising in a rocky grid of triangles and curves to nibble a vine. The composition implies the persistence of myth in daily life that Craxton so loved in rural Greece.
Craxton wrote to Ben Nicholson: “…what Greco didn’t know about the power of triangles, circles & curves is no ones affair but his. I wandered through Crete, sometimes on a mule, last October & journeyed to his birthplace really a magic place a small limestone valley with very ‘Mount Sinai’ slivers of cliff rising sharply out of the thick forests and lemon & orange trees black caves & water springs & the sea a mile away. You must come to Greece…”
From Christmas 1946 Craxton had toured other Greek islands on a naval vessel. Moved by the “incredible sensuality and depth of feeling” of Eleventh Century mosaics at the Nea Moni monastery on Chios, he responded to masterpieces of Byzantine art. Twenty years on he noted in the catalogue of his Whitechapel Gallery retrospective that “the tremendous spiritual transcendence of the imagery gave me a challenge and an incitement to work which is still with me”.
It would remain with him – inspiring linear paintings of increasing radiance – until he finally left Greece another 40 years later.
I.C.
The butcher had been a star turn in the tavernas of Poros during National Service in the Greek Navy, dancing the zeibékiko with its climax of a backward somersault over an upturned chair. The performance, repeated in a bar near the Minoan palace, gave Craxton a strange pang of familiarity. Soon he recognised a folk survival dating back 3,350 years to the bull-leapers in a Knossos fresco.
In 1948 he returned to trek into the White Mountains of western Crete to trace Cretan Resistance comrades of his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor. He stayed so long that smart friends in Athens, who had warned against visiting what they saw as the Wild West of their country, where lethal blood feuds only paused for bigger war-time battles, reported him missing and possibly murdered. He had just gone joyously and riotously native.
Between those two trips, in a spell of elated industry on Poros, Craxton painted this magnificent picture, plus the smaller works Shepherds near Knossos and Galatas. Artistically and personally he found his home on turning 25.
While his post-Cubist painterly language in Farm Yard still derives from Picasso, echoing earlier scenes of Pembrokeshire and the Scillies, he is finding himself in the light, life, landscape and legends of Greece. His elongated figures link to El Greco. The woman carries an amphora – classic ceramic container for wine, oil or water – that might be Minoan. The girl both runs with blithe abandon and dashes to dislodge a goat rising in a rocky grid of triangles and curves to nibble a vine. The composition implies the persistence of myth in daily life that Craxton so loved in rural Greece.
Craxton wrote to Ben Nicholson: “…what Greco didn’t know about the power of triangles, circles & curves is no ones affair but his. I wandered through Crete, sometimes on a mule, last October & journeyed to his birthplace really a magic place a small limestone valley with very ‘Mount Sinai’ slivers of cliff rising sharply out of the thick forests and lemon & orange trees black caves & water springs & the sea a mile away. You must come to Greece…”
From Christmas 1946 Craxton had toured other Greek islands on a naval vessel. Moved by the “incredible sensuality and depth of feeling” of Eleventh Century mosaics at the Nea Moni monastery on Chios, he responded to masterpieces of Byzantine art. Twenty years on he noted in the catalogue of his Whitechapel Gallery retrospective that “the tremendous spiritual transcendence of the imagery gave me a challenge and an incitement to work which is still with me”.
It would remain with him – inspiring linear paintings of increasing radiance – until he finally left Greece another 40 years later.
I.C.