There are major celebrations in 2022 for John Craxton’s centenary – with a very special touring exhibition launching at the Benaki Museum in Athens on Tuesday 12 April and running to Sunday 11 September. The retrospective survey then opens at the Municipal Art Gallery in Chania on Monday 3 October – what would have been John’s 100th birthday. Further venues will be announced later. Nearly 100 exhibits in Athens will chart the entire Craxton career, and most especially his abiding love for Greece. Many have

The long-awaited biography John Craxton: A Life of Gifts, written by Ian Collins and published by Yale University Press in 2021, has been warmly and widely reviewed and it is already in a second edition. Now the beautifully presented book has been short-listed for the Biographers’ Club/Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize and long-listed for the Runciman Award. A Greek version is coming soon and a Turkish edition will follow.

This year’s extended Aldeburgh Festival will include a tribute to John Craxton. All of the 13 Craxton paintings and drawings collected by singer Peter Pears, and normally hung in the Red House – the home he shared with composer Benjamin Britten – will be on view in the Concert Hall Gallery at Snape Maltings. Free entry. An essay on this very personal Suffolk collection has been written for the festival book by Ian Collins. Image: Two Greek Dancers (detail), 1951

This centenary exhibition will pair Craxton pictures with Picasso ceramics, many from the collection of the late Sir Richard and Lady Sheila Attenborough. The display will be augmented with often previously unseen works by mould-breaking artists in Craxton’s circle, including Lucian Freud, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Robert Colquhoun and Nikos Ghika. Free entry. Details of talks and other events will be announced soon. Image: Shepherd and Rocks, 1943. Lender: Britten Pears Arts

This exhibition focuses on the friendship of the artists Niko Ghika and John Craxton, and the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Their shared love of Greece was fundamental to their work, as they embraced its sights, sounds, colours and people. Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994), John Craxton (1922–2009) and Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) were significant cultural figures of the 20th century. Leigh Fermor is perhaps the most widely known of the three – largely through his travel writings – and Ghika and Craxton are now recognised as

The Craxton Estate now works with the leading London gallery of Osborne Samuel. Headed by Peter Osborne and Gordon Samuel, the gallery specialises in Modern British Painting and Sculpture and has a high reputation for the quality of its exhibitions and publications. Our launch exhibition John Craxton in Greece: The Unseen Works ran from 10 May to 8 June 2018 and was an enormous success. With daily crowds, the show was the most popular in the West End gallery’s history. While most of the featured