Author(s): Ian Britain

Art

Biography of Australian Artist Donald Friend, concentrating on the first 20 years of the artist's life. The book explores the experiences and influences that shaped a significant and controversial figure in Australian Art.

Ian Britain’s biography brings together rich and revealing detail of Friend’s life and career. There are fresh investigations of the myths, and less glamorous realities, of his ancestral and family background. We are then taken on a journey from his privileged childhood and education in Sydney and rural New South Wales, through his earliest professional training in the city’s art schools, to his first sexual encounters and love affairs. We follow him to Northern Australia, where he engaged with the communities and culture of the Torres Strait Islands, and to the wider world of his student years in the UK and Europe and his spell in West Africa, where he practised as an ethnographer as well as an artist. His years abroad were marked by early career success but also by emotional trauma. On his return to Australia after the outbreak of the Second World War, Friend began to gain wide recognition for his art in his homeland, before enlisting in the army and embarking on his diary. 

These various narrative strands are deftly set within the framework of turbulent international events and developments: two world wars, a major economic depression, the waning of empire and the burgeoning of modernism in the arts worldwide.