Donald Friend - Career

Career

Friend's critical reputation in the 1940s equalled those of William Dobell and Russell Drysdale, but by the time of his death it had sunk so low that his work was totally absent from the 1988 Australian 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", despite winning the Blake Prize for religious art in 1955. Nor did he mince words about his sexual preferences, depicting himself as "a middle-aged pederast who's going to seed" in his journal. His relationships consisted in large part of a series of affairs with adolescent boys, some of whom became his lifelong friends, particularly Attilio Guarracino.

Friend was well known for studies of the young male nude, as well as his wit. His facility as a draughtsman may have contributed to the undervaluing of his work, which art scholar Lou Klepac said "always looked too easy – decorative, flowing and natural." In the mid-1960s, Robert Hughes described him as "one of the two finest draughtsmen of the nude in Australia," and noted his humanism and lack of sentimentality, while still maintaining 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, said 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."

Friend also published a number of illustrated books, almost all in limited editions, which displayed the same wit and sensuality that informs much of his art. In 2001 the National Library of Australia began publishing the journals that Friend had kept since he was 14, and which chronicled in half a million words a life peopled with such artists as Drysdale, Margaret Olley, Jeffrey Smart, Brett Whiteley and others.