Barry PearceInterrupted 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.