Noel Counihan

Noel Counihan was a passionate individual. From his late teens his life was a struggle between his commitment to political activity which championed the underprivileged and suppressed, and his art, in which he sought to develop a telling critique of his own society. He succeeded in the latter, some of his paintings - of the working man and woman, the sick, the marginalized, the political protester - becoming Australian icons. This is a finely drawn portrait of a boy growing up in a Melbourne household strained by parental conflict; of a young bohemian caught up in the struggle for civil rights during the great Depression; of a staunch communist active from the 1930s through to the 1980s; of an artist determined to have an art which addressed the social issues of his day accepted; of a husband deeply committed to art and politics; of a dynamic personality given to both deep friendships and bitter aversions. Bernard Smith's telling of this Australian drama, of the minutiae, the tragedy and the sensuality of ordinary experience is almost Proustian. This biography is also a cultural history of the period. The two obsessions of Counihan's life - his art and his politics - actively involved him in most of the prevailing political, social and artistic issues of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. These were years of unparalleled artistic debate in Australia. Although a contemporary of Counihan and deeply involved in the controversies of that time, Smith describes them and the personalities involved (such as Judah Waten and Albert Tucker) with judicious detachment. His interpretation throws a new and different light on a period already well mined by Richard Haese's Rebels and Precursors. . Smith's deft integration of primary sources - Counihan's personal papers, interviews with the protagonists - succeeds in creating the most complete and intimate biography yet written about the life of an Australian artist.