Donald Friend 1915-1989 Retrospective

Lou Klepac and The Beagle Press for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1990. Minor secondhand wear at cover extremities, good condition.

Friend's 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.