“Drawn to Light” surveys the superlative career of John Craxton (1922–2009), an English painter in love with the Aegean. Craxton’s teenage years devoted to studying Picasso and drawing nudes in Paris were curtailed by war in 1939, when he was summoned to blacked-out England. Poor physical health halted his prospects of conscription: In the ink-and-watercolor Poet in Landscape, 1941, he drew himself next to an oak whose branches, turned into a war-machine, stab leaves while legions of war prisoners march nearby; reading Blake under a bomber’s moon, the artist is a sitting duck for Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Self-portrait, 1946–47, captures Craxton’s ecstasy of reaching Athens in 1946: Captured with semi-Cubist lines against a turquoise background, the artist beams with life.
Fruits of his new life in Poros, the Greek island where Craxton spent the next decade, are a set of portraits, including Dancing Sailor I, 1950, a gouache on paper, and The Butcher, 1964–66, a pencil drawing of a Cretan meat monger. Inspired by the beautiful habitués of Poros’s tavernas, these portraits allowed Craxton to experiment with styles such as pointillism and Cubism, and to articulate his homosexuality, which remained illegal in England until 1967.
Craxton savored the light’s effects on the Aegean. In Two Figures and Setting Sun, 1952–67, a bather rests next to an octopus fisherman who smashes his catch to soften it. Waters and mountains of Hydra surround these figures, whose outlines glow with yellow and red, while the setting sun pulses. Craxton took fifteen years to paint this arcadian homage to his adopted land, which marries, in a mesmerizing way, his love for Greek antiquity and English romanticism.
— Kaya Genç
