Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 13 Sep 2018, 19:11
A queer approach to
sexual preference labelling in art-history: looking at case studies in British
mid-twentieth century art: 5. John Craxton
The aim of this group of blogs is to look critically at some
of the publications relating to gay male artists in the mid-twentieth century.
This is in part to begin trawling for a dissertation topic for my MA in Art
History. My initial thoughts relate to focusing on one of these artists,
although their contexts include each other, their treatment of male nudes in
relation to the iconographic, contextual and stylistic features which propose
such a subject for art (for some of the choices this will include photography
as well as painting) and ‘queer theory’. This will look at the issue of
labelling of course, particularly at the important terminology of
‘homosexuality’, which dominated the period. My hypothesis will probably be
that such a term was, and remains, a means of marginalising, even to the point
of negation, of such art. This blog develops some ideas around the work of John
Craxton.
Craxton did not paint nudes as part of his public, nor, as
far as I know, private, subject matter in art. This may be significant. His
young men are always clothed and follow certain ‘simple’ types, a kind of
Continental version of ‘Shropshire Lads’, though characteristically shepherds,
goatherds, sailors and young working men dancing in Greek tavernas. These have
a kind of stereo-typicality about them, even when they could be said to be
based on realisations of his fantasy life. He loved the bars frequented by sailors
from Souda Bay, conveniently near Chania. He smiled when the supporters of the
fascist colonels reported him as a spy because an educated Englishman who loved
sailors’ bars was thought to be, of necessity, interested in military intelligence.
This suspicion by some Cretan neighbours led however to one
of his rare politicised actions: abandoning Fascist Greece until the fall of
the colonels. His favoured genre though was pastoral, and pastoral is only ever
indirectly political and at the level of a generalised iconological practice.
And pastoral represented his insistence on idealising – Greek males in
particular, such that the violent family blood feuds he knew of in Crete never get
even suggested in his art, the only threat posed by his subjects being their
luxurious and irreversible eating up of what is good and which sustains – like the
goats he shows picking the last fig leaf of an isolated tree in a beautiful
landscape (my favourite being Goat,
Sailor and Asphodels 1986, a consciously iconographic work).
Pastoral in Craxton is hopeless beautiful and hopelessly
flawed. His young men are as radically unreal as is the island itself at the
level of his wishes, and, in a favoured icon of young men thrashing octopi,
with a ruthlessness in their passion:
An island where lemons grow and
oranges melt in the mouth and goats snatch the last fig leaves off small trees
the corn is yellow and russles (sic.) and the sea is harplike (sic.) on
volcanic shores saw the marx (sic.) brothers in an open air cinema and the
walls were made of honeysuckle
Craxton hated the novel (and film) Zorba the Greek as being too critical of Greek country people,
sailors and their character.
John Berger once tried to see the bare feet that
characterise these young men as a hint of political realism, a subtle politics, but they equally act as an emblem of the naked essence of the men. They are
often focused upon at the cost of massive distortions of the figure and its
place in the landscape, or patterned as the emblem of masculine togetherness
in dance. The examples are complex and not clear icons of attraction, though
they approach that. Examples are Figure
in a Grey Landscape 1945, Greek Fisherman
1946, Galatas 1947, Pastoral for PW 1948, The Dancer, & Two Greek Dancers 1951, Shepherds
near Knossos 1947, Boy on Wall
1958, Workman III 1961, Voskos II 1984, Two Figures And Setting Sun 1952-67.
Craxton was a painter of queer pictures but I think he,
unlike other case studies here, could be comfortable with the category of the
homosexual which he could equate with Orpheus at the mythic level and the
sexologists’ category. It did not stop him seeking marriage with Margot Fonteyn
(but it didn’t get far) but it did stop him from using his privileged position
to facilitate a gay lifestyle in a Britain that became increasingly oppressive
for many of the unprivileged. Arcadia was gay and it lived in Greece, and
latterly just in Crete. But his shepherds have complex desires. Collins
(2018:181)[1]
traces them all to a common type made up of complex private iconographic
meanings but focused on friendship and George Psychoundakis the Cretan shepherd
and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Runner and dear friend, the ties with whom were not
remotely sexual. Yet, despite this, using Craxton’s biography would go none of
the way to understanding his art. Let’s take Still Life with Three Sailors, which he worked on (with variation)
from 1980 – 1985.
Craxton’s friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, traces the roots of
the painting (cited Collins 2011:151) [2]
to Byzantine icons of the visit of three angels to the house of Abraham. The
largest version (ibid: 153) focuses on an empty chair at the picture plane
occupied by the sailors’ caps, one labelled for the Greek Navy ship, Kriti (Crete).
This empty chair is provocative – it is occupied but inviting (perhaps I get
that from the way the abandoned fork lies in what looks like a plate of stuffed
peppers). Craxton may be semi-present here, not least in the untipped cigarettes
packet, labelled with his own name in Greek characters. In the last version it
is part of what Leigh Fermor calls a pattern of wandering red in the picture –
more prominent and modulated in this version than others by virtue of pink light
patterns on the floor. In the trio the youngest sailor seems picked out from
the rest, his arm spanning the table and his face lost in green shadow. He
alone might look up to see the viewer and is the only one not given entirely to
drink and thought.
Whatever it might mean, its iconography is private but it
clearly focuses on desire, memory (a nostos painting to Leigh Fermor) and
appetite. And there is the menace of the warning to the sailors to avoid breakages
in any onset of post-prandial plate-smashing. It is most delicate, though tough
and in it lies, I believe but I have not got there yet, something that is not ‘homosexual’
but is queer, a desire and appetite that momentarily floats free. This needs
more work but it would unite it with the complex of appetites in numerous
paintings of cats, trees and birds and their patterned, and labyrinthine,
connections to each other.
All the best
Steve
[1]
Collins, Ian (2018) ‘The Later Years: John Craxton’ in Arapoglu, E.. (Ed. trans.
Cox, G. & Johnston, P.) Ghika,
Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece, 3rd Ed. Nicosia,
A.G. Leventis Gallery, 179 -186.
[2] Collins,
Ian (2011) John Craxton London, Lund
Humphries
A queer approach to: 5. John Craxton
A queer approach to sexual preference labelling in art-history: looking at case studies in British mid-twentieth century art: 5. John Craxton
The aim of this group of blogs is to look critically at some of the publications relating to gay male artists in the mid-twentieth century. This is in part to begin trawling for a dissertation topic for my MA in Art History. My initial thoughts relate to focusing on one of these artists, although their contexts include each other, their treatment of male nudes in relation to the iconographic, contextual and stylistic features which propose such a subject for art (for some of the choices this will include photography as well as painting) and ‘queer theory’. This will look at the issue of labelling of course, particularly at the important terminology of ‘homosexuality’, which dominated the period. My hypothesis will probably be that such a term was, and remains, a means of marginalising, even to the point of negation, of such art. This blog develops some ideas around the work of John Craxton.
Craxton did not paint nudes as part of his public, nor, as far as I know, private, subject matter in art. This may be significant. His young men are always clothed and follow certain ‘simple’ types, a kind of Continental version of ‘Shropshire Lads’, though characteristically shepherds, goatherds, sailors and young working men dancing in Greek tavernas. These have a kind of stereo-typicality about them, even when they could be said to be based on realisations of his fantasy life. He loved the bars frequented by sailors from Souda Bay, conveniently near Chania. He smiled when the supporters of the fascist colonels reported him as a spy because an educated Englishman who loved sailors’ bars was thought to be, of necessity, interested in military intelligence.
This suspicion by some Cretan neighbours led however to one of his rare politicised actions: abandoning Fascist Greece until the fall of the colonels. His favoured genre though was pastoral, and pastoral is only ever indirectly political and at the level of a generalised iconological practice. And pastoral represented his insistence on idealising – Greek males in particular, such that the violent family blood feuds he knew of in Crete never get even suggested in his art, the only threat posed by his subjects being their luxurious and irreversible eating up of what is good and which sustains – like the goats he shows picking the last fig leaf of an isolated tree in a beautiful landscape (my favourite being Goat, Sailor and Asphodels 1986, a consciously iconographic work).
Pastoral in Craxton is hopeless beautiful and hopelessly flawed. His young men are as radically unreal as is the island itself at the level of his wishes, and, in a favoured icon of young men thrashing octopi, with a ruthlessness in their passion:
An island where lemons grow and oranges melt in the mouth and goats snatch the last fig leaves off small trees the corn is yellow and russles (sic.) and the sea is harplike (sic.) on volcanic shores saw the marx (sic.) brothers in an open air cinema and the walls were made of honeysuckle
Craxton hated the novel (and film) Zorba the Greek as being too critical of Greek country people, sailors and their character.
John Berger once tried to see the bare feet that characterise these young men as a hint of political realism, a subtle politics, but they equally act as an emblem of the naked essence of the men. They are often focused upon at the cost of massive distortions of the figure and its place in the landscape, or patterned as the emblem of masculine togetherness in dance. The examples are complex and not clear icons of attraction, though they approach that. Examples are Figure in a Grey Landscape 1945, Greek Fisherman 1946, Galatas 1947, Pastoral for PW 1948, The Dancer, & Two Greek Dancers 1951, Shepherds near Knossos 1947, Boy on Wall 1958, Workman III 1961, Voskos II 1984, Two Figures And Setting Sun 1952-67.
Craxton was a painter of queer pictures but I think he, unlike other case studies here, could be comfortable with the category of the homosexual which he could equate with Orpheus at the mythic level and the sexologists’ category. It did not stop him seeking marriage with Margot Fonteyn (but it didn’t get far) but it did stop him from using his privileged position to facilitate a gay lifestyle in a Britain that became increasingly oppressive for many of the unprivileged. Arcadia was gay and it lived in Greece, and latterly just in Crete. But his shepherds have complex desires. Collins (2018:181)[1] traces them all to a common type made up of complex private iconographic meanings but focused on friendship and George Psychoundakis the Cretan shepherd and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Runner and dear friend, the ties with whom were not remotely sexual. Yet, despite this, using Craxton’s biography would go none of the way to understanding his art. Let’s take Still Life with Three Sailors, which he worked on (with variation) from 1980 – 1985.
Craxton’s friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, traces the roots of the painting (cited Collins 2011:151) [2] to Byzantine icons of the visit of three angels to the house of Abraham. The largest version (ibid: 153) focuses on an empty chair at the picture plane occupied by the sailors’ caps, one labelled for the Greek Navy ship, Kriti (Crete). This empty chair is provocative – it is occupied but inviting (perhaps I get that from the way the abandoned fork lies in what looks like a plate of stuffed peppers). Craxton may be semi-present here, not least in the untipped cigarettes packet, labelled with his own name in Greek characters. In the last version it is part of what Leigh Fermor calls a pattern of wandering red in the picture – more prominent and modulated in this version than others by virtue of pink light patterns on the floor. In the trio the youngest sailor seems picked out from the rest, his arm spanning the table and his face lost in green shadow. He alone might look up to see the viewer and is the only one not given entirely to drink and thought.
Whatever it might mean, its iconography is private but it clearly focuses on desire, memory (a nostos painting to Leigh Fermor) and appetite. And there is the menace of the warning to the sailors to avoid breakages in any onset of post-prandial plate-smashing. It is most delicate, though tough and in it lies, I believe but I have not got there yet, something that is not ‘homosexual’ but is queer, a desire and appetite that momentarily floats free. This needs more work but it would unite it with the complex of appetites in numerous paintings of cats, trees and birds and their patterned, and labyrinthine, connections to each other.
All the best
Steve
[1] Collins, Ian (2018) ‘The Later Years: John Craxton’ in Arapoglu, E.. (Ed. trans. Cox, G. & Johnston, P.) Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece, 3rd Ed. Nicosia, A.G. Leventis Gallery, 179 -186.
[2] Collins, Ian (2011) John Craxton London, Lund Humphries