Obituaries Australia

Communist artist, Noel Counihan, died suddenly of a heart attack in Melbourne on July 5, after more than 50 years of outstanding artistic and political work. Noel was painting up to a few days before his death. The Communist Party of Australia was just about to issue him with Card No. 1 at the card reissue. Coincidentallv, the card features one of his prints.

Noel played a prominent rote in the Brunwick Free Speech fights of 1933, resisting police attempts to arrest him by speaking from a stage secured on the back of a truck which was secured to a verandah post in Sydney Road.

Three hundred friends, family, comrades and fellow artists paid tribute to Noel at a memorial gathering at Camberwell Civic Centre on July 11. Speakers included Eric Aarons from the CPA, art historian Prof Bernard Smith and Noel's sons Terry and Mick. Hundreds of others, including the ACTU and the Victorian Trades Hall Council, sent condolences. The Age published a major obituary on July 8.

Terry and Mick Counihan spoke warmly of their father's great sense of humor, his disrespect for authority, his love of music, his passion for politics and his 53 years of dedication to the South Melbourne Football Club (now the Sydney Swans). Tribune extends its deepest condolences to Noel's wife Pat, and Terry and Mick.

During his fifty-odd years as an artist, Noel Counihan carved out for himself a reputation that is, in many ways, unique. He was determined that his art should function, as all serious art should function, as a criticism of society.

He kept it that way throughout his life. In the process he made a major contribution to our democratic cultural traditions.

He began studying art at the National Gallery School in 1929. A political activist from the beginning, he helped to establish the Workers Art Club in Melbourne in 1931 and began to make prints for Proletariat the journal of the Melbourne University Labor Club, for the Workers' Voice and the Guardian, he also drew caricatures for the Argus and the Bulletin (until its rightwing politics became too much for him).

In 1935, with his friend Judah Waten, the writer, he travelled through country towns in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, surviving on portrait drawings of local notables.

These were the apprentice years in which he laid the foundations of his formidable powers as a draughts-person.

In 1940 he visited New Zealand and became actively involved in the anti-conscription campaign and was deported back to Australia. While in New Zealand he met and married Patricia Edwards, a teacher and graduate of the University of New Zealand, who was to become a tower of strength to him throughout his creative but difficult career as an Australian artist of a somewhat different kind.

Back in Australia, Counihan contracted tuberculosis and spent some time in a sanatorium. While there he decided to paint seriously.

The early paintings expressed his reactions to the ant-fascist war. But he was unhappy about them, feeling that they were little more than propaganda.

He began to dig back into his personal experience of the Depression years and completed his first major paintings, such as The Corner of Nightingale Street and At the Start of the March, which William Dobell recommended for purchase successfully for the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In 1944 he visited Wonthaggi and despite the initial opposition of the management, made many drawings in the mines of miners at work.

This made it possible for him to complete one of his greatest paintings Miners Working in Wet Conditions which won first prize in the Australia at War exhibition in 1945. With Tom Roberts' Shearing the Rams, it is one of the very few great paintings in which we see Australians actually at work.

In 1948, with the assistance of an art fund, chaired by the writer Vance Palmer, Counihan was able to travel to Europe to further his studies. He attended the first International Conference for the Defence of Peace, as a delegate of the Melbourne Trade Unions, held in Paris.

While in England he lived at the Abbey Arts Centre in Hertfordshire where many Australian artists lived, and he drew for the Daily Mail.

He joined with Jack Lindsay in producing a portfolio of poems (Lindsay's) and prints published as Peace is Our Answer for the peace movement.

Returning to Australia in 1952, the Counihans, with their two sons Terry and Michael, settled at Belgravia where Noel worked in the studio at Kallista formerly used by Tom Roberts.

His work developed in depth and range of interests. He produced a fine series of portraits, particularly of writers. But he also painted memorable works concerned with the life of Aboriginal people, the condition of women, his personal reactions to the cold war, the Viet Nam war, and the anti-nuclear campaign.

Towards the end of his life he produced one of his greatest series of paintings, devoted to the peasants of the village of Opoul, where he lived for a time in the French Pyrenees.

Noel Counihan was not simply a realist. He possessed a tragic vision of life in the twentieth century. But it was not a pessimistic vision. It is the kind of art that continually challenges the viewer both aesthetically and morally.

He sought to replenish and vitalise the democratic traditions of our culture, the traditions of Lawson and Tom Roberts. But he never allowed his art to become parochial.

His art continued to respond creatively to the world-shattering events of our century. He drew from modern artists, such as Rouault and Bonnard. what he needed but was never a prey to fashion.

Four good books have been written about his work. What we now need is a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work that will make it possible to assess its character and variety properly. It should be held, in the National Gallery of Victoria, the state towards whose cultural life he gave so much. And it should travel interstate.