Donald Friend

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Donald Friend
Birth name	Donald Stuart Leslie Friend
Born	6 February 1915 Melbourne, Australia
Died	16 August 1989
Nationality	Australian
Field	Painting, Diarist

Donald Stuart Leslie Friend (6 February 1915 – 16 August 1989) was an Australian artist, writer and diarist.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Diaries 4 See also 5 Bibliography 6 External links 7 References

[edit] Early life

Born in Sydney, precociously talented both as an artist and a writer, Friend grew up in the artistic circle of his bohemian mother. He studied with Sydney Long (1931) and Dattilo Rubbo (1934–1935), and later in London (1936–1937) at the Westminster School of Art with Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky. During World War II he served as a gunner with the AIF, and while stationed at Albury began an important friendship with Russell Drysdale which was to culminate in their joint discovery of Hill End, a quasi-abandoned gold mining village near Bathurst, New South Wales, which was to become something of an artists' colony in the 1950s. He also served as an official war artist in Labuan and Balikpapan in 1945.^[1] After the war he lived for a time in the Sydney mansion-cum-boarding house Merioola, exhibiting with the so-called Merioola Group.

Much of Friend's life and career were spent outside Australia, in places as diverse as Nigeria (late 1930s, where he served as financial advisor to the Ogoga of Ikerre), Italy (several visits in the 1950s), Sri Lanka (late 1950s – early 1960s, from whence dates this view of the city of Colombo^[2]), and Bali from 1968 until his final return to Sydney in 1980.

[edit] Career

Friend's reputation in the 1940s stood beside those of William Dobell and Russell Drysdale; by the time of his death it had sunk so far that he was totally missing from the 1988 Bicentennial exhibition, a show meant to include every artist of importance since white settlement.

Friend made "no attempt to disguise the homoeroticism which underlay much of his work",^[3] despite winning the Blake Prize for religious art in 1955. Nor did he mince words about his attractions, depicting himself in his journal as "a middle-aged pederast who's going to seed".^[4] His relationships consisted in large part of a series of relations with adolescent boys, some of whom remained as life-long friends, particularly Attilio Guarracino. His exhibitions were several times raided by the Vice Squad.

Friend was well-known for studies of the young male nude,^[5] as well as his wit.^[6] His facility as a draughtsman may have contributed to the undervaluing of his work - "[It] has always looked too easy - decorative, flowing and natural," according to art scholar Lou Klepac. Robert Hughes, writing in the mid-1960s, described him as "one of the two finest draughtsmen of the nude in Australia," and noted his humanism and lack of sentimentality, while still concluding that he was not a major artist. Barry Pearce, however, writing in the study which accompanied Friend's posthumous retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1990, commented that Hughes' judgement seemed harsh and called for a re-evaluation of Friend as an artist whose "contribution to the richness of Australian art is due for much greater recognition."

In addition to his work as an artist Friend published a number of illustrated books, almost all in limited editions, displaying the same wit and sensuality which informs much of his art. In 2001 the National Library of Australia began publishing the half-million words of the journals Friend kept since he was 14, and which provide a record of his life and times, peopled by such figures as Drysdale, Margaret Olley, Jeffrey Smart, Brett Whiteley and others.

[edit] Diaries

Friend's diaries were published posthumously from 2001-2006 by the National Library of Australia^[7] in four volumes. Volume 4 dealt in part with Friend's time in Bali in the 1960s and '70s; publicity claimed "this volume confirms Friend's quicksilver creative brilliance and extraordinary insight. He is perhaps Australia's most important twentieth-century diarist."^[8]

Following the publication of Volume 4 accusations were made that the publishers had not been granted permission to publicly name some of Friend's sexual partners, who were minors at the time of their encounters with Friend. There were also accusations that Friend's paedophilia had been whitewashed by Australian art scholars. Reported in The Age in May 2008 Bernadette McMenamin, chief executive of the child protection lobby group Childwise, said of Friend "He wrote diaries describing his sexual abuse of children and yet Australia still looks the other way because he produced beautiful art."^[9] Speaking on ABC Radio in November 2008 filmmaker Kerry Negara said of the publishers "instead of embracing those parts of the diaries where he talks about sex with children and adolescents as young as 9, 10, 12 years old in Bali, instead they decided to go down that route of denying it and even kind of turning Friend into a nice culturally accepted paedophile, at best."^[10] In November and December 2008 Negara's film about Friend's sexual behaviour in Bali was discussed on ABC Radio, in The Australian and the Herald Sun.^{[11][12][13][14]} In August 2009 the film A Loving Friend screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival.^[15]

[edit] See also

• Visual arts of Australia

[edit] Bibliography

• Donald Friend, Robert Hughes, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1965
• Donald Friend: Australian War Artist 1945, Gavin Fry and Colleen Fry, Currey O'Neill, Melbourne, 1982
• Donald Friend 1915-1989 Retrospective, Barry Pearce, 1990
• The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 1, Ed. Anne Gray, 2001, ISBN 0 642 10738 6
• The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 2, Ed. Paul Hetherington, 2003, ISBN 9780642107657
• The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 3, Ed. Paul Hetherington, 2005, ISBN 9780642276025
• The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 4, Ed. Paul Hetherington, 2006, ISBN 9780642276445

[edit] External links

• Biography
• Works 1
• Works 2
• Works 3
• Symposium papers
• Donald Friend exhibition
• Donal Friend at Australian Art

[edit] References