Design and Art Australia Online

caricaturist, cartoonist, painter, sculptor and collage artist, was born in Parnell, a suburb of Auckland, NZ, on 16 March 1895 (Renniks). He was selling drawings to local Auckland newspapers at the age of 14. While apprenticed as a lithographer on the New Zealand Herald from 1914 he studied for two years at the Elam School of Art, sharing his Auckland studio with the cartoonist Unk White , among others. When war broke out Finey served with the NZ Expeditionary Force in France as an under-aged private for three and a half years (Caban, 41, says with New Zealand Transport Corps), then was appointed an official war artist.

Sergeant Finey spent his post-Armistice leave studying at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art for three months then had to leave for Wellington on the Tainui . Finding, he said, 'After four years and 50 days in the N.Z.E.F. in Egypt and France, there was no work for me at home’, he left for Sydney in November 1919, penniless. He also felt stifled by New Zealand’s strait-laced conformity. In Sydney he contributed joke cartoons to Aussie and the Bulletin until 1921 when Alek Sass, art editor of Smith’s Weekly , engaged him as a staff artist at £9 a week (annually increased until he was finally paid £2,000 p.a.). Cartoons done during his 10 years at Smith’s include: The Spirit of Anzac 28 April 1928, 3; Asking for it (man with bum as target, in set of drawings called 'Finey’s Outlook on Life’, 12 January 1929, 23; St. Peter announces the 10 per cent. cut in Paradise 20 September 1930, 1; They Struggle On, and On, and On! 4 April 1931, 22; two original cartoons collected by Thomas Finch Roy Ottaway (ML PXD 619/13) connected with Mercantile Rowing Club, presented 1994. An outstanding caricaturist, he initiated the popular 'Man of The Week’ feature in 1922, his first subject being Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne (ill. Blaikie, 73). Many others followed (originals ML?). Many of Finey’s cartoons also appears in Salt ( e.g. Vol. 8, No. 13, 28 August 1944, p 2) but there is some speculation that these were reproduced from other papers.

Finey became known around Smith’s as 'the Bolshie’ after drawing a cartoon of the NSW coalminers’ strike, Mass Picketing . Editor Frank Marien put off publishing it until Virgil Reilly bet him £2 that he wouldn’t, so he did (acc. Blaikie?). It led to recriminations. Finey considered his left-wing sympathies 'truthfulness’ (Caban 42-43), especially in the light of increasing lack of editorial freedom for cartoonists. Vane Lindesay states that he was sacked from Smith 's for wanting to hold an exhibition of his originals, which the paper claimed it owned. He took Smith 's to court, won, and was given his originals along with his dismissal notice.

In the late 1920s he contributed caricatures of NZ politicians based on photographs to Pat Lawlor’s NZ Artists’ Annual . Other freelance contributions were to the Australian Budget , e.g. (two dandies) 'HAROLD: “This dashed depression is too simply awful”/ ETHELRED: “Yes; I have deprived myself of bath salts, but when I think of the vast army of unemployed who have done likewise, I don’t feel the blow so much”’, 12 December 1930 (see file); '[MAN]: “What’s the trouble with my wife, doctor?”/ [FAT DOCTOR]: “I don’t know – she’s not dead yet!”’ 7 November 1930, 18. A strongly political cartoon of a fanged gorilla holding weapons and money , Sitting on Top of the World-War Debts , appeared in Ure Smith’s society magazine Home in March 1931, 23. Finey was one of the founders of the New Theatre in 1932 (when it was known as the Workers’ Art Club). He was its first president and when new clubrooms were acquired at 36 Pitt Street, held the first exhibition there, opened by Dame Sybil Thorndike, showing paintings, cartoons and other works (Fox).

Finey freelanced for a while, then accepted a job drawing political cartoons for the Sydney Labor Daily , though this meant taking a pay cut of £30 a week from his Smith’s salary, to £10. It was here, however, that he is considered to have best captured the mood of the Depression, e.g. (Coleman & Tanner, ills 38-39, 41-44, 70, 108, 174), Basic Wage February 1931, Dole Queue September 1931 (which Mary Eagle says prefigures similar representations by Bergner, Counihan and Vic O’Connor by more than a decade); The Most Reverend Michael Kelly DD, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney ; The Illegal Gift 16 May 1932; The Branding Iron 1932 (ill. King, 120); and (after Governor Game dismissed the Lang government) Plutocracy/ Autocracy May 1932 (ill. Caban 46-7).

He had free reign on Labor Daily for about six months, then found his cartoons were increasingly being rejected. A year later he was sacked, which he blamed on the influence of Albert Willis, a Jack Lang offsider, Lang being one of Finey’s major targets. Again unemployed and on the dole, he was surprisingly offered a job on Truth by Ezra Norton, but it did not last long either (there is some speculation it was only two years). Perceived anti-British sentiments in a cartoon about the departing Governor of NSW, Sir Phillip Game, whom Finey had been caricaturing for years (e.g. when he’d sacked the Lang government in 1932), was said to have lost the paper advertising revenue and Finey was reprimanded by Norton and editor Mark Gallard. (Game, on the other hand, sent him a letter inquiring whether he could purchase the original, stating that he had a scrapbook of cuttings of the many caricatures Finey had drawn of him: Caban 42-46.)

He contributed to Saga: A protest in linocuts by the Worker Artists , published by the Worker newspaper in 1933 [c.1932-35 acc. JH] (ML F7741/W) (ill. Coleman & Tanner, 106), e.g. lino block depicting a skeleton head with a factory crown spewing/eating workers, with a splash of red blood for effect.

About the same time Finey contributed 'Armistice Day’, a bleak illustration to Geoffrey Cumine’s poem 'The Crimson Path’, Railroad 10 November 1933 (ML, ill. Kirkpatrick, 251), which ends:

“Remember such as set the path

Whereon the soldiers died…

Unheedful of the aftermath,

They lied, my Lord, they lied.”

Original Bulletin cartoons (ML) include six drawings of 1920 and 1934, and 11 caricatures of 1930, 1940, 1945 (including one of Bruce Dellit). He drew cartoons for the left Red Leader (21 August 1931-July 1935) and for the capitalist Daily Telegraph , where he was political cartoonist from at least 1936: three originals, Signs of the Times published DT October 1936, Non-aggression pacts – Portugal, Germany, Italy, Spain – scraps of paper , published 1 October 1936, and another published 17 March 1937, are at ML PXD 619 (collected by Thomas Finch Roy Ottaway and presented in 1994). An original c.1940s cartoon is at ML PXD 764, while EVICTED [showing Sir Eric Spooner as a landlady evicting a little man in a bowler hat] “I’m not having any of your common type here” [1940s?] and another about Local Government Amending Bill in the Spooner Papers (ML mss) were evidently also for the DT . A 1941 cartoon is illustrated in Coleman & Tanner (p.130).

Finey and Will Mahony left the Telegraph in 1945 after refusing to draw an anti-Labor propagandist subject demanded by the editor. Mahony was fired but there are differing accounts about whether Finey, as his replacement, was fired or resigned. Finey then drew for the Federated Miners’ newspaper the Common Cause , often producing versions of his Worker prints, e.g. Daily Press , 20 July 1946, 3 (acc. Graeme Byrne). He ended his newspaper career producing political cartoons for the communist weekly Tribune .

Finey was especially admired in his lifetime for his caricatures. An issue of Art in Australia devoted to them was published on 15 June 1931 (they alone are numerous in ML). A lifelong bohemian, he always wore a white shirt and white trousers and was coatless, hatless and sockless whatever the weather. His photograph at the Artists’ Ball in Pix (23 April 1938, 34) is captioned: 'George Finey, famous Australian caricaturist and cartoonist, arrived in full evening dress – except trousers. Startling effect was enhanced by Artist Finey doing a wild dance. Moustache is false.’

He was equally dedicated to the fine arts. His 1935 solo exhibition was the first exhibition of 'modern art’ to be held at David Jones Gallery. It included The Milky Way , a cluster of coloured marbles set in wood decorated with whorls of oil paint direct from the tube and framed in corrugated iron. Late in life he held exhibitions of his paintings and collages in Japan, London and New York. From the late 1970s until his death in June 1987, aged 92, he lived in a humble cottage at Warimoo in the Blue Mountains. At his last painting exhibition, held in the Blue Mountains when he was in his eighties, he accepted the tag 'the last of the great bohemians’ (there’s a good description of his 'bohemianisms’ in Caban, 40), although during the 1920s he lived with his wife at Mosman (see Joe Lynch ). By 1940 he was long married (to Nellie) and living at Turramurra, an outer Sydney suburb, then utterly rural and non-bohemian (Unk White, 'My rendezvous with reminiscence’, Second Laugh Anthology 1940, 19). In his eighties in the Blue Mountains he continued to experiment with avant-garde ideas that combined art and music. A retrospective was held at the Sydney Opera House in 1978.

Finey was an inaugural member of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Society in 1924. All 25 (male) inaugural members contributed to 'the first publication issued under the auspices of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists’, The U.S.A. Fleet Souvenir , published in July 1925 to commemorate a visit of the American Fleet to Sydney (ill. Lindesay 1994, 7). The 48-page book, which cost 1/-, included cartoons and comic strips by: Garnet Agnew , Jack Baird , Stan Cross , F.H. Cumberworth, W. Dowman, “Driff” (Lance Driffield), George Finey, Cecil Hartt, Joe Jonsson, Frank Jessop, Fred Knowles, George Little, Brodie Mack, Hugh Maclean, Arthur Mailey, Syd Miller, Syd Nicholls, Mick Paul, Jack Quayle, Reg Russom, Cyril Samuels, Jack Waring, Harry J. Weston, Unk White and John Wiseman , while the writer and poet Will Lawson contributed verses. 'A major contribution… was the wonderful series of caricatures of American high-ranking naval officers drawn by George Finey, then working with Smith’s Weekly ', says Vane Lindesay (1994, 9). He remained a lifelong member of its successor, the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club, attending the 1986 presentation of the Bulletin Stanley awards only a few months before he died.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007