Noel COUNIHAN

Australian 1913–86

The lady with the fox-fur coat, 1942, is one of Noel Counihan’s first paintings. Until 1940 Counihan made prints and drawings and was a successful illustrator and cartoonist. He drew caricatures freelance for the Bulletin, Smith’s Weekly and the Melbourne Sun News Pictorial. These were not necessarily political in content and Noel Counihan was known nationally as a caricaturist. For years he also worked gratis as a left-wing cartoonist on union and Communist Party newspapers.

By nature and as a Communist Party member, the artist was a polemicist. Most of Counihan’s paintings are disputatious. Daniel Thomas has written: ‘Noel Counihan painted memories of the economic depression of the 1930s’,1 although the woman here is dressed in the fashion of 1940 with a big fox-fur jacket giving top-heavy proportions to the shoulders from which emerges a close-hatted head. The idea of this fashion was to have the face framed and flattered by soft fur, but Counihan uses it to suggest a figure that is bloated with prosperity, even a little threatening. The man is bent under his heavy sack and the burden of poverty and its attendant homelessness, hunger, isolation and marginalisation.

The exaggeration and contrast between the two figures takes up the argument in the bluntest way. At the same time, Counihan’s cartoon side gives the figures a wry animation. The diagonal line across the man’s eye is a cartoon device denoting drunkenness, sleep, sickness, sadness or even someone who is not ‘the full two bob’.

The Picasso-like head on the bent man is like those of Yosl Bergner, a young painter from Warsaw who was trained from his early teens in expressionist and School of Paris styles. When Counihan was hospitalised for months with a long bout of TB in 1941, he realised he had time to learn to paint and Bergner was his teacher.

Many young artists in Europe the 1930s began to paint cartoon-like images with political meaning. They had looked at Daumier and Goya, at the twentieth-century German artist Max Beckmann and the Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera.

1 D. Thomas, Outlines of Australian Art: The Joseph Brown Collection, expanded ed., South Melbourne, 1980, p. 37.

Jennifer Phipps