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Craxton-Picasso - A Day at Holt Festival

• 26 July 2022 10.00am - 2.00pm
• St Andrew's Church, Meeting Room & Gardens, Holt, Norfolk NR25 6EZ
• Exclusive to EAAF Members - if you're not a member and would like to attend this event Join Now.

Event Sold Out - please email events@eastangliaartfund.org.uk to join the waiting list

This wonderful day at the Holt Festival focusses on the Craxton-Picasso exhibition with talks by both DJ Taylor and Ian Collins!

Craxton-Picasso celebrates the centenary of John Craxton, pairing his pictures with Picasso ceramics, and previously unseen works by mould-breaking artists in Craxton’s circle. The exhibition has been curated by James Glennie for Holt Festival 2022 and includes original works, many never previously or rarely shown, by John Craxton, Pablo Picasso (ceramics), Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Alberto Giacometti, Niko Ghika, John Banting, Julian Trevelyan, Mary Fedden, Christopher Wood, Eduardo Paolozzi, Jacob Epstein, Isabel Rawsthorne and photographs by Joan Leigh Fermor.

Our day begins with a lecture by DJ Taylor, Golden Horizons: Cyril Connolly and Literary London 1939-50, which will take place under the Alberto Giacometti Chandelier for Peter Watson which hung in Horizon’s office in Bedford Square, London and was later owned by John Craxton. This will be the first ever public showing of this important chandelier.

Horizon: A Review of Art & Literature, was founded in 1939, with Cyril Connolly as editor, financially backed by Peter Watson, who was also its de facto art editor and uncredited associate editor Stephen Spender. It quickly became the most significant platform for emerging writers and artists. Among them W. H. Auden, Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, John Craxton, Cecil Day-Lewis, Lawrence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Lucian Freud, Graham Greene, Barbara Hepworth, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Augustus John, Paul Klee, Osbert Lancaster, André Masson, Henry Miller, Nancy Mitford, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, George Orwell, John Piper, J. B. Priestley, Herbert Read, Bertrand Russell, Vita Sackville-West, Jean-Paul Satre, Osbert Sitwell, Graham Sutherland, Dylan Thomas, Peter Ustinov, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and a young James Lord.

After the talk, D J Taylor will sign his Times Book of the Year Lost Girls – Love War and Literature and his new book Stewkey Blues (both available at the Festival).

Before lunch, we will have the exclusive pleasure of an introduction to the Craxton-Picasso exhibition by Ian Collins, curator, writer and author of the recently published and widely acclaimed monograph John Craxton - A Life of Gifts.

Lunch will be served in a marquee at St Andrews, and we will be joined by Ian Collins and DJ Taylor. We then have the afternoon free to explore the other Holt Festival exhibitions, including the Sir John Hurt Art Prize and the Sworders Prizes for young and emerging artists at the Adrian Hill Gallery.

Tickets are £29 per person and include tea and coffee, lecture and lunch. The event is hosted by Amanda Geitner

10.00 am	Arrivals at St Andrew's Church Holt, tea and coffee
10.30	Talk by DJ Taylor, St Andrew's Church
11.30 - 12.30	Ian Collins, book signing and introduction to the Craxton-Picasso exhibition
12.30	Lunch at St Andrew's Church
2.00pm	Explore Holt Art Prize and Close

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