Noel Counihan

Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary

By Bernard Smith

Oxford University Press Australia, 1993.

568 pp., $59.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/7423

"Knock them off their feet with truth and reality", wrote an artist friend of Noel Counihan to the Australian artist. Counihan - painter, caricaturist, political cartoonist and lifelong member of the Communist Party - did just this in his life as a left-wing artist. His life is recounted with honesty and sympathy in the new biography by art historian Bernard Smith, himself a CPA member from 1939 to 1951 and still retaining a dissident and anti-elitist edge to his criticism.

The "art establishment" experienced Counihan's brush strokes as "aesthetic blasphemy" because Counihan painted workers, the poor, Aborigines and prostitutes, offending much of the world of "high art".

Arthur Streeton gave some early advice, suggesting that the talented young firebrand should paint landscapes and "not the homes and activities of Melbourne's working class". The Age art critic in the '40s counter-punched with jibes about Counihan's "chip-on-the-shoulder class rubbish", while the poet Geoffrey Dutton could muse with genuine perplexity on "what artistic capital can a painter make out of beer drinkers and the unemployed?". Art critic Robert Hughes was still flailing away in 1970: Counihan's art is "flypaper for whatever emotions we may have about breadlines or dole victims".

Ignored or belittled as a propagandist by "the propertied classes" and their cultural ideologues, Counihan won the love and respect of the people he painted and painted for. A miner's daughter, whose attempt to escape from her class was halted by exposure to Counihan's paintings of Wonthaggi coal miners, wrote to him that "you gave validation to their lives, confronting at the same time those who lived by the exploitation of such people".

Born in South Melbourne in 1913, Counihan soon found himself in open revolt against "all that had imprisoned me through childhood and youth: my parents' marriage, religion and suburban morality". The religious choir school he attended, with its addiction to discipline and status, was "a very good training school for atheism". As a young man he had become, in his own words, "utterly unrespectable, totally bohemian, communist and revolutionary - the whole hog".

This was no passing rebellion of youth. He was deeply politicised by the Depression, tying a permanent knot between his own oppression as a child and student with the other victims of the '30s. He joined the Young Communist League in 1931, aged 18, sparing nothing then or later in his party activities - from the anti-eviction and free speech campaigns to the struggles against war and fascism.

Even romance was politicised. For the 24th birthday of his future wife, Patricia Edwards, "love and politics fused" with Counihan's gift to her of a copy of the Marx-Engels Correspondence.

Through all this political activism, he drew and painted. His subsequent career is rich in lessons on the successful uniting of art and politics. Best described as "social realist", Counihan's art was concerned with social issues of the day, employing a style radically dissimilar to the "abstract obscurantists". "Back to everyday life", he wrote in 1959, "to intelligibility - simplicity - clarity".

This did not mean that his work lacked depth, subtlety or internal tension, but it did speak directly and powerfully to the people he wanted to serve. His style was (Blue) poles apart from what a fellow realist called the "drip, splash and diarrhoea" of the Jackson Pollocks of the abstract art world.

He was a passionate artist with a vision, "highly self-confident", a young man "who found it difficult to tolerate dissent". With the weakening of his old political certainties about the socialist credentials of Russia, the late '60s became "a time of significant change" for Counihan: "he grew more tolerant, more forbearing, more sympathetic to positions not his own in politics and art". Gone was the "old, impassioned rhetoric, the tendency to denounce artistic 'opponents' and rivals" like Sidney Nolan. His style became more contemporary as he became more influenced by the "wild forms" of art.

This change did not entirely please all his admirers. A 1976 edition of Direct Action (an ancestor of GLW) carried a review of an exhibition of Counihan's 1966-76 paintings which suggested that he might have "somehow lost direction", diverted by "too much innovation ... too much effort to break with the past". This and similar criticisms, says Smith, were attempts to make Counihan an "art fossil" of the Depression, to "stereotype him into a 1930s-40s man".

Yet the "new look Counihan of the 1970s" could justifiably prompt some class nostalgia. His new stylistic approach was more oblique, his political views those of the CPA, which was moving away from the old confidence in the elemental class struggle. This robbed Counihan's art of something of its political immediacy, but his artistic exploration of new issues (the women's movement, mental illness) added something more complex and innovative, too.

Whatever the painting technique, Counihan was able to steer clear of the anti-humanism of the abstract painters. In his realist days, by painting workers "without sentimentality or glamour", he avoided the pitfalls of the art-in-uniform of Stalinist "socialist realism" - the art, as Counihan put it, of "the flashing teeth and the full Colgate smile, of [a working class] marching valiantly to a radiant future".

His tendency, however, to present the working class in its "bleak austerity" without any romanticism, found its critics within the CPA who wanted less of the pessimism, less of the "sad, bowed down" figures and more of the "hope for a better future for humanity". Humphrey McQueen's view, too, was that Counihan "pictured what was, without hinting at what could be"; he "produced dismal colours and depressed, almost dismal people". This is a little ungenerous - it is difficult, in life as in art, to please everyone by striking the right balance between socialist optimism and realism.

Counihan died in 1986, leaving a legacy of drawings and paintings which continue to ennoble and inspire those for whom art means more than something to be "purchased to go with the drapes and carpets" - an art which is committed to the cause of the working class and to socialism.