ESSAY | Part 1: Does the demand for accountability really account for art?

The question as to whether an artwork can be disentangled from its creator is not new but has attained new urgency amidst the recent renewal of emphasis on accountability and social justice. As evidenced by the attempted “cancellation” of Khaled Sabsabi, moral panics can prove dangerous to politically committed artists.

Donald Friend, Desolate plantations, Balikpapan, 1946, oil on canvas 46.4 x 61.3 cm. Collection of the Australian War Memorial.

Museums and galleries often attempt to decolonise their collections and embrace diversity, equity and accessibility by ditching the elevated status of the artist. Yet artist narratives still reign supreme as we are encouraged to judge the work through the creator’s biography. Suzanne Cotter, the Museum of Contemporary Art director, is quoted as saying, “if you are a white male artist, you are not so interesting. . . . It doesn’t mean to say you’re not a great artist.” In other words, the work is at best a secondary consideration. After all, many great artists were horrid people and yet, as W.H. Auden mused in “The Memory of W.B. Yeats,” 1939, “Time . . . will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardon him for writing well.”

In his 2016 article, “Our favourite paedophile: Why is Donald Friend still celebrated?,” Antony Funnell refuses to pardon Friend or his work and instead “calls out” the institutions who display Donald Friend’s (1915 ̶ 89) art. Understandably, concern for the survivors of abuse is paramount for Funnell—and there is also the issue of colonial exploitation and othering observed in both Friend’s behaviour and his art. That said, Friend’s paedophilia need not dwarf an analysis of his work, and the exploitative dynamic is not always evident in all of Friend’s paintings. Nevertheless, Funnell questions, with pearl-clutching absurdity, the National Gallery of Victoria displaying a landscape by Friend. At one point, Funnell asks, “How would it be possible to appreciate Picasso’s Guernica . . . without realising it as the direct embodiment of his personal morality and ideology?” But Pablo Picasso (1881 ̶ 1973) was also exploitative, and when his partner Fernande Olivier briefly adopted a thirteen-year-old child, Picasso had the child strip and model for him.

It is telling that Funnell picks Picasso’s most overtly political masterpiece but were it Le Rêve (The Dream), 1932, we had better leave our conscience at the door. Even then, the example of Guernica, 1937, is unfortunate. In his book Creators, 2006, the ever-scurrilous Paul Johnson describes how Picasso “would create situations in which one mistress angrily confronted another in his presence, and then both rolled on the floor, biting and scratching. On one occasion Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter pounded each other with their fists while Picasso, having set up the fight, calmly went on painting [Guernica].” Guernica survives its specific historical context and its troubled scene of production. To treat Guernica merely as protest art would be to deem it a failure since it did not prevent Nazi atrocities.

Much of what is striking about Guernica is its emulation of photography, its intentional flatness, and artistic and symbolic allusions. It is a work about a Nazi atrocity and barbarism, but it is also a work about art and pictorial representation, about the meaning of images in a time of mechanically induced destruction and technological image replication. In his early drafts for Guernica, there is much more sorrow and passion evident but in order to expose the dehumanisation of the Nazi bombing of the Basque town, Picasso emptied the victims of their subjectivity, turning faces into masks. Some may even find it perverse that we hear the cry of the horse reverberating through the canvas rather than the wail of the mother. The horse occupies the centre of the composition, while human forms are reduced to jumbled bodies, frozen gestures, and a decapitated mannequin. But animals suffer in war too (and as a result of human consumption and entertainment), so it is curious that Picasso, spectator of bullfights, could show so much empathy for animal suffering.  

Donald Friend, Rescued prisoners of war, Balikpapan, 1945, pen, ink, crayon, white gouache, paper, 40 x 58.7 cm. Collection of the Australian War Memorial.

Oddly, Funnell’s article includes a work by Friend that, like Guernica, evokes the horror of war. In the remarkable painting Rescued Prisoners of War, Balikpapan, 1945, we witness the prisoners in a state of skeletal emaciation—spectres of war and cruelty. In this regard, the paintings and works accompanying the article seem to counter Funnell’s argument. And Friend’s (anti)war work, Desolate Plantations, Balikpapan, 1946, not featured in the article, depicts a scarred and charred environment, conveying not only a concern for humanity but also for ecology. Friend describes the palms as having been “beheaded” and records that “there was hardly a bush or tree left living.” Even Friend had moments of morality, but these were also balanced with wonder at the misshappen environs. Art cannot judge without aestheticising, a truth that plagues even artists who adopt anti-aesthetic strategies.

Of course, I can understand why people would struggle to look at Friend’s depictions of children, some of them victims of his abuse. Yet, even in these instances, Friend captures their beauty in a manner that suggests their subjective interiority. Evoking childish bravado and innocence, he grants his subjects the agency that was in actuality denied them. Even though he was not giving them a voice and was instead reinforcing what postcolonial theorists may call a subaltern status by painting over their experiences, the works refract rather than reflect his understanding of the world. In a way that is both chilling and relieving, we do not glimpse Friend’s crimes directly; rather, we witness, through an exoticised prism, a utopian liberation of sensuality unencumbered by adult concerns—a depressing irony. Indeed, irony abounds. While Friend’s work does not venture into the racist caricatures of some primitivist, exoticist and Orientalist works, the works nevertheless reflect his colonial gaze and fantasy. The oriental fantasy is at once a liberation from the confines of the moralistic, homophobic, prudish West, and at the same time a fantasy that is the product of Western domination. Art evinces the contradictions of both the artist and society, mingling and mangling liberation with tyranny. Ironies are therefore compounded, as these depictions may still cause harm to their subjects, further stifling their freedom. One person named in Friend’s published diaries, who was abused when he was ten, has sought compensation from the National Library of Australia over the publication of Friend’s diaries. This does raise a different and very difficult issue, not so much about the appreciation of Friend’s work, but rather about the ethics of displaying specific works depicting real people without consent.

In Friend’s case it is right to judge his actions as unconscionable—he should not have been allowed to get away with it, and there is the possibility of continued harm in displaying some of his works. But appeals to inclusiveness and sensitivity can and do restrict artistic freedom, often in the service of reactionary ends. Think of the case of Khaled Sabsabi who has only recently been reinstated as Australia’s 2026 Venice Biennale representative after much protest by the arts community. The near-cancellation of Sabsabi, itself a chilling threat, hangs over critics of Israel’s campaign of Palestinian Guernicas.

It is clear with Sabsabi that artworks can have a moral and political significance. I am not making an art for the art’s sake argument here. Art’s role is not always moral, nor does great art always emanate from a politically engaged artist. But art always means something: form is merely the arrangement of content. Even when art is political or moral it is not always made by people with a reliable moral compass—just think of Frida Kahlo’s (1907 ̶ 54) Stalinism despite Stalin’s assassination of her one-time lover Leon Trotsky (1879 ̶ 1940). Her, Self Portrait with Stalin, 1954, is conveniently forgotten though it offered a more interesting likeness than Picasso’s romanticised 1953 drawing of a young Stalin.

Thankfully, art refracts rather than reflects the artist and their world. Great art is not a mirror; if anything, it is a prism that offers the perceptive spectator a spectrum of illumination.

Images courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.

Dr Aleksandr Wansbrough is a writer, lecturer and artist, interested in film, art and philosophy.

This article was first published in Artist Profile Issue 72. Part two of this essay was published in Artist Profile Issue 73.