Interrupted
Genius: Donald Friend as Artist
Barry
Pearce
I would firstly
like to make a quick comment on the article published by Susan McCulloch
on Donald Friend in the Australian last Saturday. There was a miscommunication
entirely my doing, and which reflects neither on Miss McCulloch, nor the
artist. With her deadline looming there was a hasty, rather distracted
telephone discussion, when I was as usual on roller blades, in which I
told her the gist of a quote inscribed by Donald in one of his diaries,
to the effect: ‘Like most young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully
humour intervened.’ My memory of this quote was imperfect, and I should
have told her to check for accuracy, having used it myself at Donald’s
funeral 12 years ago, not knowing whose it was. Whether or not it was
by him, it seemed to me a delicious piece of self-deprecation in tune
with Donald’s psyche, too good to pass up.
Unfortunately,
not one of the hundreds who packed the funeral came forward to enlighten
me afterwards, and the quote by default went into legend as Donald’s.
The upshot is that a reader contacted the literary section of the Australian
this week and said these words sounded very close to a passage by a well-known
writer, not Donald Friend. Indeed, the accurate version is exactly the
words of this writer. Donald never noted the source. Why should he? It
was a jotting in his diary for his own private reference.
So,
my apologies to old ghosts. Like most young men, I should have read more
of, and more carefully, Lawrence Durrell.
I
became involved with the life and art of Donald Friend during his last
nine years, and with increasing frequency his final 12 months. I watched
him readapt to Australia after returning from Bali, where he had lived
for more than a decade until 1979; watched him struggle to accommodate
the effects of debilitating strokes suffered during 1987. I witnessed
him dying; saw his efforts to write and draw and paint to the last possible
moment, overwhelmed and consumed by the mortality he both celebrated and
mocked throughout his career.
However,
I have to say, when looking at the publication of the diary drawings just
released by the National Library, I got a shock of memory when I saw the
entry of 19 December 1988. Farewelling life, and greeting death, he wrote
‘Ah, mortality I knew you were hiding behind that grey curtain’, and named
me, along with James Fairfax and his nurse, as one of just three worthy
surviving friends. I feel slightly embarrassed by this, and want to set
the record straight.
There
were many loyal friends standing by for Donald in the end, like supply
ships hovering offshore but forbidden to deliver. Most had known him far
longer than I had, but his behaviour towards them had become atrocious:
he drove those friends away, abusively, even when they had arrived with
food, offers of help; their kindness thrown back in their faces.
Of
course I was organising his retrospective, the one final recognition he
desperately craved. I was the advocate with the potential to define his
place in the Pantheon of Australian art. So we must keep this in perspective,
indeed perhaps when reading all the diaries. The way Donald saw things
may not necessarily represent the absolute truth. The subjective viewpoint
can be a fiction of convenience in which truth plays a part. Or is it
the other way round?
What
this means is that my own ability for dispassionateness about Friend’s
standing as an artist is perhaps more questionable than most. It was not
like dealing with a long dead artist like Tom Roberts, or Charles Conder,
or Elioth Gruner. And even with other living artists one could keep at
a certain arm’s length. Arthur Boyd lived a long way away, and had minders.
Ten years out from the Donald Friend retrospective I feel hardly more
distant from the subject. This does not mean I am going to shirk the challenge
of objective assessment entirely, but I would like to tell just a little
of my personal involvement to contextualise the way I perceive his achievement.
In
1979, I was invited by John Olsen to a lunch. He said it might change
my life. It was at the house of Donald’s old friend Attilio Guarracino
in Melbourne. The story is well known how Donald had met Attilio in Ischia
in 1950 and brought him to Australia. There were artists and writers and
publishers at that lunch—including Len French, Olsen and, of special significance,
the publisher Richard Griffin, proudly showing the first copy of Donald’s
sensational new book Bumbooziana. At the head of the table was
Donald himself, newly arrived from Bali. There was talk then already about
the need for a retrospective, and his neglect by art museums. Being of
the generation I am perhaps, I did not immediately see him as a contender
for such a prestigious event. Robert Hughes had written a brilliant assessment
of the artist, published in 1965 by Edwards & Shaw, but strangely
enough Hughes eloquently, as well as celebrating the enormous talent of
his subject, declared his limitations, exposing deep fault lines of doubt.
Born in Sydney, raised on the land, embarking on a journey during the
Great Depression to northern Queensland which set the tone for a lifelong
obsession with exotic cultures—Africa, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Bali—Donald
was in my eyes a brilliant illustrator–raconteur, but there was a long
queue of more serious artists of the modern era who deserved attention
first; so it seemed to me then. Something happened to my priorities that
afternoon in 1979 in Melbourne. It took ten years for the retrospective
to eventually happen, but its genesis was irrevocably set in train. I
had never before, and have never since, witnessed so many artists and
their associates conjoined for the better recognition of one of their
fellows.
In
1981 Friend moved to Sydney. I was asked to lunch with him in the Art
Gallery of New South Wales restaurant by publisher Lou Klepac. Lou had
proposed a book of lithographs by Donald illustrating the Carmina Burana—to
be titled Songs of the Vagabond Scholars—and I was invited to join
them both for weekly meetings whilst Donald showed his progressive drawings
for the book, and spoke into a tape recorder for a new publication on
Russell Drysdale.
For
me these weekly meetings were a hook from which there was no release.
I entered the unlikely laboratory of an alchemist and witnessed gold being
made. I must explain that the Iluka Inn in Bondi Junction, where Donald
then lived and worked, was not the place that its name suggests or what
I expected, given the Balinese ambience that had become legend: you know,
portal fringed by palms; garden graced with flowers, sculptures and carved
columns; rooms filled with objets d’art; days of moist warm air and deliciously
creative ennui, engendered by gin-infused juices and the cooking of wild
pig. Oh no. The reality of the Iluka Inn in Bondi Junction was a grey,
unforgiving little room, a setting for suicide for all but the most robust
souls. Here Donald performed miracles. He drew from a skull which sat
on his work top with coffee cups and amaretti. He made a watercolour of
the monotonous red rooftops and 1960s architecture outside his window
resonating to a fabulous curve of mackerel sky clouds. He transformed
a gloomy storm across Sydney Harbour as if it was the backdrop for a Wagnerian
opera. The world came alive to his gaze. The English painter Walter Sickert
once said of one of his younger colleagues: ‘The artist is he who can
take something ordinary and wring out of it attar of roses.’ This was
Donald at work in Bondi Junction.
Years
later, when organisation of the retrospective became a more concrete reality—and
I won’t go into the stress I had to endure to get it accepted into the
Gallery’s program—I began to visit Donald alone. Firstly in the small
house in Paddington found for him by Margaret Olley, then at Holdsworth
Street in Woollahra where he lived for the last two years. This last period
was not a happy time. The decline of anyone’s life is tragic, but in Donald’s
case the poignancy was that he clung so desperately to the glittering
illusion of the way he saw the world. And as it slipped away from him,
it was as if all his inner dissatisfactions had come home to roost.
At
one period I was visiting him daily, showing him photographs of the latest
works I had found scouring public and private collections. But in the
final months this became futile. On occasion I found him watching cartoons
or ‘Play School’ on the badly tuned television set, scribbling with pastels
on a sheet of paper on his lap. He said he hated doing this but needed
the flickering colour. I believe he was mainlining these images into his
optic nerves to keep himself stimulated, like the asthmatic desperately
forcing air into his lungs. His mind wandered. On a few occasions his
nurse drove him to the Gallery where I introduced him to staff, and showed
him his own works for discussion about his materials and methods as well
as subject matter. Once he requested to be wheeled in to see the space
to be used for his exhibition. It was after hours, but unfortunately there
was a social function going on—well-heeled people standing around with
wine glasses—and for a moment this scene conflated itself in Donald’s
mind to the opening he had longed for. ‘Where is the press?’ he said,
smiling up with that snaggle tooth. I detected in some, looking down at
this unshaven troll, in crinkled short-sleeve shirt and stained pyjama
pants, one finger adorned with a fat gold ring, a tremor of repulsion.
In several months time these same people would be falling over themselves,
after he was dead, to attend the opening of the great artist’s exhibition.
A
few times I helped his nurse put him to bed, and each time he begged me
to write about his grotesqueness and self-disgust, for it was a connecting
thread, he said, as important as any other in understanding his life and
character. One night the nurse failed to appear and I had to stay with
him alone until help came. The final indignity of his loneliness, self-created,
underlined a fundamental discontent, and failure in relationships, that
ran through his life. Now I do not know whether we should be aware of
these things or not—it’s perhaps a little beyond the provenance of curators
and art historians—but I feel they throw into relief a significance about
Donald’s happiness in terms of his work. He was really only ever completely
happy when drawing and painting—and I mean ever, from his childhood. He
was like a troubadour who needed to sing, each day, every day. The curious
thing is that when I think of his picaresquesness, his performance as
a draughtsman painter with ebullience and wit and confidence, exciting
us with fizzing line and evanescent vitality, making us laugh with his
wicked observations, I am not quite sure how close we are allowed to come
to the artist’s soul. He was a troubador with a mask. Even those countless
self-portraits which may be tracked through all his work, seem to me a
journey through a hall of distorting mirrors as we look for some elusive
essence of his self. Veering between vanity and self-deprecation, each
represents a kind of querulousness; a search maybe on his part for the
disappearing utopia of youth.
At
the age of 22 in London, arriving the year before, courtesy of £100 from
his grandmother, his self-portrait is a small, swift, concentrated image
in brush and ink. In a letter to his mother at the time he describes himself
thus: ‘My figure is much the same—slim and what-not—my hair is long and
my eyes are wild like a poet’s. My mouth still expresses the insatiably
erotic desire for insatiability, and my brows have lost none of their
fine curve.’ Then two years later we see a rather more controlled, astonishingly
mature work with pen and wash. He was in West Africa by now, living amongst
the Yorubas, adviser to the Ogoga of Ikerre.
In
1942, enlisting with the AIF, he was stationed at Albury where he met
Russell Drysdale and painted with him in his studio. This was an important
friendship which others will no doubt touch on. Meanwhile, it is interesting
to compare two interpretations made at roughly the same time: the self-portrait
of 1944, and Drysdale’s portrait of him in 1943. One could almost say
that Donald’s view of himself was the alter ego with the deeper sense
of gravitas that he admired in Drysdale, and Drysdale’s perspective is
of the mercurial, intrepidly sharp personality that he really was.
Self
portrait in the Barrett Hat 1966, shows Friend probably not long
before leaving for Bali via Jakarta, where he would fall under its spell
and decide to settle there later in the long term. The portrait does not
indicate anything of the fact that at this moment he is reaching the end
of a destructive love affair and desperate to escape Sydney. The troubadour
wore a mask.
A portrait
from his manuscript book, Ayam Kesayangan I, made in Bali
1968–78, is a curious interpretation, to be repeated, of himself as a
kind of simian beast fashioning the illusion of a civilised man. This
may be the most explicit, or deepest we are allowed to penetrate the essence
of his self-perception. Also in Bali, a beautiful portrait of 1972 of
himself seen in a carved mirror; which to me symbolises the European detachment
that always separated him, no matter how closely he may have felt in tune
with the rhythm of his adopted culture. A portrait appears in the diary
of 1982 and is published in the recent National Library book. He has inscribed
on the side: ‘As I look now—I think. But who knows what he looks
like if he depends on a shaving mirror? Anyway, not ludicrously grinning
as in the newspaper photograph. Nor gibbering like a vivacious ape, which
is the way most people see me.’
These
are two self-portraits on facing pages from his 1985 book Art in a
Classless Society. His body was in reality now becoming more amorphous,
head sinking lower into the critical mass of his flesh, bones collapsing;
so these come across as quite exaggerated.
The
strokes of 1987 were followed by a self-portrait called The Sentence
1988, where the artist has been forced to paint with his right, or alternative
hand, imaging himself as a dark, immobilised, Caliban-like figure awaiting
the sinister personage at his side to accompany him to his final destination.
One
of his very last works, Spectators in the Sky 1989, is perhaps
a projection of that destination, as he looks up at the faces of his beloved
exotic angels looking down at him. The obscure scumble of pink in the
bottom left may be the space into which he imagines his physical form
will ultimately sublimate, as the December 1988 entry goes: ‘Aloha death,
long dull dreamless nights. Ah, mortality I knew you were hiding behind
that grey curtain. My soul is transparent, heliotrope pink but not nearly
as invisible.’
The
retrospective, which opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in February
1990, then toured Australia, was a big public success. It had drama, colour,
humour, wickedness, and a fascinating biographic journey. One critic,
Christopher Allen, wrote a very good review. Good I think because it had
some stinging truths which made me, for one instant, want to write my
text all over again. (Of course it was only an instant, because I realised
that one cannot be, or it was very difficult to be, advocate and critic
at the same time.) He acknowledged the vibrancy given out by the works,
and the power of engagement they induced in the public. But he was puzzled
by a dilemma, and I quote:
The extraordinary
thing about this exhibition is that is conveys the vivid sense of great
talent, of energy and of appetite for life, and yet does not contain a
single unequivocally great or even significant painting. In fact, the
artist’s more famous diaries are more interesting than most of his pictures,
and the illustrations that proliferate on almost every page are often
more gripping than the works on the walls. With Friend, the first impression
is usually the best; he recalls Karl Krauss’s uncharitable definition
of a journalist as a man who cannot improve a piece by rewriting it.
He went on:
‘The vitality we find in the exhibition derives less from the inherent
quality of the pictures, than from the force of the personality with which
they are suffused.’ But he then concluded: ‘Beyond the restless personal
search, there was in the life of Donald Friend a more universal even utopian
longing, to which it is hard to refuse our sympathy.’
Reading
this review again recently I looked through the plates of the catalogue,
wondering if I might identify those works which could be described as
‘significant’. Of course the critic cleverly chose to refer to painting—not
a ‘great or even significant painting’ were his words—and so I suspect
he chose to sidestep the possibility of assessing the artist’s greatness
in another way. I selected a small group of works to discuss here, based
on a fairly immediate sense of their freshness, and a quality which to
me made them rise up from the huge mass of the artist’s oeuvre. I responded
to images without thinking about media and so it is interesting that,
out of the 27 or so images I selected, only four are oil paintings. I
will expand on this issue a little further on, but let’s skate quickly
through them.
Firstly,
three early works connected with his stay in Africa between 1938 and 1940:
Mother and Child 1938.
Something
of the influence of the Westminster School with the teaching of Mark Gertler
and Bernard Meninsky is evident, in its tendency towards large simple
forms, but the subject above all exudes Donald’s personal feeling about
the figures and lifestyle of the Yoruba people.
Group
of Bronze Figurines (four individual bronze figurines
(Figure Riding c.1939; Figure on Head c.1939; Two Seated
Figures c. 1939; Standing Warrior c.1939).
The
most absorbing of all his forays into exotic cultures, born of extensive
research of Benin bronzes and lost wax casting.
Port
Scene, Africa.
Possibly
Lagos, or another coastal port visited en route from Marseille in 1938.
As with Mother and Child, a likely English influence: the primitivist
Christopher Wood, who was highly fashionable at this time.
Two
splendid drawings of the war period: Brisbane 1944; and The
Incinerator 1944. Both were produced in Brisbane where Donald was
sent to serve in a labour camp for going AWOL, but which ironically produced
his most powerful drawings to date. These are referred to as the gas chamber
works because of the studio space he was given. Clearly the neo-romantics
in England had touched him, especially John Piper, as well as the drawings
of Henry Moore. Russell Drysdale bought The Incinerator as soon
as he saw it, writing: ‘It’s so grand … That group sprawled out in the
foreground gives me that splendid feeling that Goya awakens in me sometimes
… one day I’ll tell you just how much it has meant to me for one period
of my life. It inspires me with all sorts of grand feelings. I can never
be grateful enough to you for having painted it.’
Other
drawings of the 40s:
Head
of a Woman 1945.
Perhaps
the finest figure drawing, barring Degas, in the entire collections of
the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was included in the Gallery’s recent
exhibition,
Drawing
the Figure: Michelangelo to Matisse, and held its own very well.
Houses
on Big Oakey 1948.
Drawn
the year after Drysdale and Friend had discovered the old goldmining towns
of Sofala and Hill End in western New South Wales; soon after which Donald
bought his house in Hill End. His most ambitious work here was the The
Apocalypse of St John the Divine 1949, a 4.5-metre-long watercolour
drawing now in the National Gallery. Donald himself was not kindly disposed
towards this work, but it is considered to be one of his masterpieces,
not unlike in style the dining room murals he was to execute for James
Fairfax at Bowral 15 years later.
Lest
we avoid the humoresque altogether, the Bosch-like Love Me Sailor,
was painted in 1948 as a response to the censorship scandal ensuing over
Robert Close’s book of the same title. Friend had purchased it just after
moving into the art-colony mansion Merioola in 1946. Close’s book was
banned and the author gaoled. In 1949 Friend went to Italy from which
came the drawing The Studio Stairs, Firenze, and then in London
three very beautiful studies of Omu, his favourite model, drawn during
1952–53.
In
1957 he sailed for Colombo with Russell Drysdale’s son Tim, but just before
he did, produced The Fortune Teller in Hill End in 1956—without
doubt one of his best paintings. Rich in colour and shape, it recalls
one of the artist’s earliest loves of modern French painting: Paul Gauguin.
Margaret Olley has pointed out that the decorative elements were inspired
by a reproduction of Indian elephant rugs. Then in Ceylon [Sri Lanka]
he produced a substantial body of work, from the trompe l’oeil doors,
An Exotic Garden Viewed at Different Levels 1957, whilst staying
on the estate of Bevis Bawa, whose brother the architect Geoffrey Bawa
later installed the doors in his house, and there they stayed until purchased
by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1988; to the large mural City
of Galle 1961 commissioned by a prominent shipping company. This walled
Portuguese fort was captured by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and
became the Ceylonese centre of the Dutch East India Company.
He produced
some ravishing watercolours of figures set against ancient temple and
rock paintings, and the odd mysterious work like The Overlander
1960, a kind of hybrid between an Aboriginal bark painting and a medieval
map with fragmented symbols. Then after Ceylon (Sri Lanka) he continued
with what we might call hieroglyphic, or symbolic, abstraction, such as
this strong drawing Trojan Horse with Two Groups of Figures c.1964.
In this case there was a connection with the aluminium sculptures he had
done in Ceylon and for which he still deserves recognition. These works
show us that, although a figurative artist to his core, he was capable
of the purest abstract qualities: in the enjoyment of disembodied washes,
interpenetrating shapes, and dynamic, almost self-sufficient calligraphic
hatching in his Still Life with Chair of 1965. Another early love
in modern French painting is evoked: Georges Braque. Hughes said, ‘drawing,
for Friend, was not so much a way of describing the world as discovering
a possible relationship with it through form.’
If
anyone’s head is reeling from the sheer diversity we have described so
far, let us return to the essence of Donald Friend’s purpose as artist—drawing
the human figure. Drawing the human figure was an ongoing process. Youth,
Death and the Maiden 1965 was a theme revisited many times from the
1940s and, although we could look at some dazzling decorative images from
his period in Bali, the watercolour Darimana, early 1970s, has
the restrained glow of Gauguin, showing Friend’s loyalty to his earliest
inspirations. The magnum opus of Bali, however, is a huge watercolour,
The Earth Imagined by Martians, 1977, housed in the National Gallery
of Australia. It is an impressive synthesis of all the magic the artist
felt about his exotic world, weaving dreams, fantasies and satire through
it like some supernatural tapestry. At the left is a detail of the motif
already explored: the artist as simian beast staring into a mirror held
by his servant whilst painting the illusion of a noble personage, the
lord of a grand household, no doubt. As for the title, is there one that
is more symbolic of being the outsider; of feeling, no matter how close
to the world he is describing, separate from it?
This
View of the Harbour 1981 is the watercolour I mentioned made from
the apartment in the Iluka Inn; and Pears, Avocado and Balcony View
1984 shows a contrasting window vision from an upper room of the freestanding
house in Paddington to which he moved after Bondi Junction. This was a
prolific period of still life watercolours, such as Tamarillo Harvest
1987. I am sure most here have seen the film by Don Bennetts in which
Friend describes the transference of his ageing painter’s eye from the
youthful sensuality of desire-electrified nudes to the colourful models
of the greengrocers shop. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘to recall Braque’s solemn
and profoundly sonorous harmonies embracing a lemon on a plate. Or Bonnard’s
summer hymn to a peach’.
And perhaps
it is fitting to end by considering two images from the last diary, 1982–88:
a still life of lemons and a drawing of the Glass House Mountains made
during a visit to Lawrence Daws in Queensland during 1983. It is interesting
to note that Brett Whiteley also stayed with Daws and made drawings of
the same subject. Those few, including myself, who have read the diaries
from beginning to end, say that Donald Friend’s diaries may be his greatest
works of art and that their publication will reveal at last the crowning
glory of his career. Perhaps this is because they contain moments when
he put aside the instruments and librettos of the performer and gave us
more of his essential self. Or is it simply because of his inimitable
marriage of word and image? Considering the critic’s statement which
prompted me to look through the images just described, what does this
accumulation over half a century amount to? Is it possible to compact
all we know of him into a core, a combustive entity by which we may measure
the vast dispersal of his genius? I am afraid my objectivity now deserts
me, and it is for others to answer this question in a tougher way.
One of the
problems with Donald Friend is his absence of singularity compared to
his great friend Drysdale. Whilst Donald was singing songs to all points
of the compass, Drysdale was slowly building masterpieces like Sofala,
The Rabbiters and Snake Bay at Night, which finished up in
art museums where pilgrims could visit. And when they go to those museums,
they expect to find the works hanging there. With Donald you have to peruse
the pages of books, storage racks, request the solander box from the print
room, visit the manuscript library, accumulate the parts and put them
together in your mind. Does this make him less great? Perhaps because
of the powerful element of satire within him, there is an instinct to
classify him outside the mainstream, as may be done with Thomas Rowlandson,
or S.T. Gill, both of whom he admired. In other words, outside the milieu
of serious painting. In a forest of eucalypts he was a rampant vine, curling
through the spaces, spicing the greys and dull greens with his perfumed
colour, and I think we should be thankful for his existence. It was a
burst of exuberance against the monotony of being ordinary.
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