Donald Friend: framing morality in its own time and place

Donald Friend was exceptionally talented, although he never quite achieved the recognition or artistic maturity one might have expected.

Partly this was because his particular abilities were treated as marginal to the fashions of modern art in his lifetime, and because he tended to enjoy the more superficial rewards of brilliance instead of the deeper but more demanding ones of artistic development.

His behaviour was clearly reprehensible, but before we consign Friend’s pictures to the basement we should consider some important questions. The first is whether we want to make an example of one individual, or whether we really intend to undertake an inquisition of artists and other notable people from the past, undoubtedly discovering unpalatable stories in the process.

As noted in my colleague Michaela Boland’s article, there are many other well-known cases involving artists, including Paul Gauguin. The biographies and even autobiographies of writers are also filled with questionable behaviour. Andre Gide, for example, recalls in his autobiography Si le grain ne meurt (1924) having sex with a young female prostitute in Algiers and, later, at Oscar Wilde’s suggestion, with a flute boy in the oasis of Biskra. Does this mean we should stop reading Gide’s novels, or cease producing Wilde’s plays?

The other question is whether sexual misconduct is the only kind that concerns us. Caravaggio, who undoubtedly had sex with young girls and boys, also killed at least one and probably two men. So did Benvenuto Cellini, by his own admission in his autobiography (where he also recounts outrageous treatment of his female models). Are we going to take Caravaggio’s work off the walls, or remove Cellini’s Perseus from the Loggia de’ Lanzi in Florence? Or what about our own Sidney Nolan? Patrick White was convinced that he drove his wife Cynthia to suicide through mental cruelty. Does that count? Do we also take down paintings, stop reading books and stop showing films by every artist who has been compromised by their allegiance to evil political ideologies?

Or have we adopted the oddly American puritan bias that makes sexual misconduct seem worse than other kinds of wrongdoing, where a man caught frequenting call girls or rent boys is set upon by the moral lynch mobs?

It is the paradox of ethics that we must seek universal principles of right and wrong, and yet we cannot expect that other cultures and other times will always share our standards. In a mature judgment of past lives and times, we may have to start by understanding them within a framework of values different from our own, even as we criticise those values from the point of view of ones that we now consider as more enlightened.

Christopher Allen is The Australian’s national art critic.