Dancing men, prancing goats | John Craxton at Pallant House Gallery

The lifelong rejection of authority and convention that shaped John Craxton’s life can be in large part explained by his childhood connection with West Sussex, and, in particular, with the city of Chichester, where he was sent to board at a choir school, aged 11.

Now he’s back. A posthumous retrospective of Craxton’s six-decade career, A Modern Odyssey, curated by his biographer Ian Collins, opens at Pallant House in Chichester this weekend.

Craxton (1922-2007) was one of five siblings brought up to enjoy the good things in life in a creative, bohemian household in St John’s Wood. His father was a pianist and composer, and when in 1930 he received a lump sum of royalties for scoring a popular song, he bought a seaside shack in Selsey, where the family would spend wild, idyllic, barefoot holidays.

It came as a shock to the system, then, when the young lad was sent to Prebendal Choir School in Chichester, just a few miles inland from his holiday home, a ‘Dickensian’ institution where canings were meted out for the most minor of misdemeanours.

‘One thing is certain’, he wrote in 1998, before a previous exhibition at Pallant House, ‘I owe it to Chichester for helping me to become a pagan, but above all, I owe to Chichester a Pauline conversion to what I still most emphatically call art.’

In the same essay, he attributes this artistic ‘conversion’ to a daily encounter with two early 12th-century Romanesque bas reliefs in Chichester Cathedral, where he had to attend morning mass. ‘I came to realise, without help, that great art from the past could be without epoch: it could look fresh and immediate and modern, and didn’t have to mimic nature to look real’.

He carried this very modernist lesson into his artistic career: first as a young man in London, where he enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame while still in his teens, with exhibitions of his neo-romantic, symbol-rich work shown to an admiring public in regular shows at the Leicester Galleries in London. Feeling constricted by the austerity of post-war London, however, he soon moved to Greece, where he added vivid colour and exuberance into his work, wooed by the laissez-faire lifestyle, which allowed him to freely explore his homosexuality. Away from the public eye, though, his reputation in his home country soon faded, while contemporaries such as Lucian Freud (a great friend during and immediately after the war) and Francis Bacon rose to overshadowing prominence.  

So is the narrative of this latest Pallant House retrospective a sad tale of decline and fall? Not a bit of it. Collins was at hand at a press view of the show on Thursday to explain that Craxton’s desire to have fun – he spent more time in tavernas chatting up sailors than at work at his easel – superseded his ambition to nurture his fame or fortune (he was often skint, relying on the good will of his many friends for bed, board and bottles of retsina). But, while he certainly lived life to the full, he never stopped working: five rooms full of his exuberant art, demonstrating his ability to experiment with a range of styles, are testament to his dedication.

The subject matter of his paintings reflects his enormous love for Greece, and the Greeks: there are mountains, and sunsets, and sailors, and defiant-looking girls; there are dancing men, and prancing goats, and pan pipes, and olive trees. References to ancient myths and classical culture abound. The influences are clearly broader, though: you can see traces of Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, El Greco: in style, these are very European paintings. The best of them, painted in the 40s and 50s, are a refreshing antidote the drab-palette offerings of his London-based contemporaries living on rations in post-war London.

There are drawings, too: Craxton was a brilliant draughtsman, and used to pay for haircuts and taxi rides with graphite-sketched portraits of the barber or driver: these occasionally surface for a pittance at Greek car boot sales, says Collins. Craxton could take years to finish a painting – he was rarely completely satisfied with his work – but he never spent more than half an hour on a pencil drawing.

Pallant House has for some years striven to make connections between contemporary artists and the twentieth-century modernists whose work they generally exhibit, and which forms the largest part of their extensive collection. In the 80s, a teenage Tacita Dean met John Craxton while on holiday with her parents in the Cretan port of Xania, where the artist lived: he inspired in her an artistic vocation. She was persuaded by Collins – or ‘hounded’, as she puts it, at the press view – to return to the port town and make a short film in homage to Craxton, who she still cites as her favourite painter. This eight-and-a-half minute art movie, shot on 16mm film and projected on a split screen, is dedicated its own room in the exhibition, suggesting that Craxton’s Crete is still recognisable, and still reflects its ancient past in its vibrant present.

In a similar vein, in one room in the townhouse section of the gallery the emerging artist Jake Grewal (b. 1994) has been asked to choose his favourite works from Pallant’s collection, of Craxton contemporaries such as Keith Vaughan, Paul Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. Grewal is also given a room of his own for his large-scale canvases of blurry androgynous figures in dark landscapes; it was too near lunchtime for any of the critics to dally there long.

Chichester Cathedral is a short walk from Pallant House Gallery, and will from December house a Craxton tapestry he fashioned while staying in Edinburgh in the 70s, having been temporarily booted out of Greece by the fascist junta. It is also home, of course, to those remarkable Romanesque bas reliefs, which had such a profound influence on the artist as a young boy. A post-prandial visit to the cathedral reminds me of their lasting power. Sometimes it is more valid to look to the past, rather than the present, to get a fuller perspective of an artist’s career.