My interest in lithography possibly derives from an early introduction to the work of Daumier and Garvani in a special edition of The Studio (1914).
Drawing with lithographic crayon (no rubbing out) in life class while in New York probably gave me the desire to try the real thing, but, unfortunately, that particular school was not equipped to teach lithography and I could not afford classes elsewhere.
Howard Giles, one of the two teachers in New York who gave me so much, had been a friend of George Bellows, and through him I became aware of the work of Bellows and his friends.
Before returning to Sydney I saw a show in New York of lithographs by Orozco — and still remember the experience though not the works in detail; and a few years after my return to Sydney Emil Bisttram, my other teacher, sent me two lithographs from a portfolio which he was preparing.
Probably these incidents, plus the casual loan of a book on Metal Plate Lithography from Robert Emerson Curtis, sparked the desire to do something about it.
In 1939, after some searching, I bought a small press (28" bed), read about Senefelder (who discovered the process), Rex Whistler and others, bought some metal plates and felt I was all set to print lithographs.
Why metal plate and not stone? The problem was that stones were more or less unprocurable in Sydney. With the increasing flexibility and efficiency of the printing process most printers had scrapped their stones and discarded the small hand-press. In place of stones, ready-grained zinc plates were available.
Getting a roller was another unexpected problem. The 'phony war' was on and getting the right kind of calf skin was apparently difficult; nor were any of the big printers' suppliers interested in a one-only 14" roller>
I was finally put on to 'the only man in Sydney who can make you one — if he will'. To my great relief he said he would make it — if he could get the skin. Fortunately he managed it and after several weeks' wait the roller was ready. Whether it was a good job or not I did not know, never having seen the real article, but I followed instructions in books and spent about a week rolling and scraping to remove the fuzz and get it into working order (I still use it).
Chemicals for sensitizing the plate, the relative fluidity of gum arabic, how much and when to add nitric acid, the consistency of the ink, the quality of the paper, how to judge pressure — all problems for the amateur that are routine for the professional.
First results showed that one needs much more know-how than books can give if time is not to be wasted; the subject of the first print shows what I expected and how right I was. It was not defeatism — it was an increasing awareness that what sounded simple in words was not necessarily so in practice. And at this stage I was using a small rubber roller made for lino blocks and kept the plates small to save time and expense until I was more conversant with the problems.
Visits to one or two small printing shows were helpful — I have found that technicians in the various trades are only too glad to help if one can state the problem.
An attempt to see someone actually doing a lithograph on a hand press was a dead end. The printing section at Ultimo Technical College was most helpful with advice but not a chance of even being allowed to 'sit-in' on one class as an observer (this was in 1939 — possibly things have changed since then).
With advice and more experience, prints slowly improved — two steps forward and one back, instead of two or three back.
After the war, thanks to enquiries by my elder brother to a printer friend, the friend uncovered several stones which had been thrown out years ago and sent them to me. Stones, though heavy and cumbersome, are wonderful to work on and have the added advantage that one can grain them one-self — and to the surface required.
Cranking the stone (or plate) through the old-fashioned press is strenuous and can have its problems; stone or plate must be even and dead level, the pressure just right; a slight variation can lead to a weak spot or line on the print when rolling it through the press.
The right conditions for working can be most helpful but in my case I had to make-do with a small room of the upstairs flat. "Plenty of clean water" was supplied by two buckets, taking care not to flood the ceiling of the flat-owner below.
After that a cellar in Gordon gave more freedom but, as these were temporary quarters I did not bother too much with refinements, a hose from the tap outside the door (plus buckets) made the job somewhat easier.
Later, when we succeeded in building our small house, plus the old stables as studios, I put in a couple of sinks and running water so conditions are now pretty good.
When things are really going well — which happens occasionally and keeps one's spirits up — it is most encouraging to see the prints emerge as one good job after another and that of course leads to the monotony of repeating the same thing over and over. A big advantage of doing one's own printing is that one can stop when one wants, experiment when the 'run' is finished or wash the work off and start again with graining, etc. One also feels that one has fully created the work — that it is in fact, with all its individual difference, completely the work of the artist.
17 November 1975
The above was written in 1975. Due to part to the interest of Lin Bloomfield in my work and the increased activity and change in the print-making scene, I am at it again — but this time with the advantage of advice from artists who have studied and worked at a professional level; Michael West at the Willoughby Workshop is one who has been most helpful. Maybe there will be another period of lithography — provided an ageing back can crank the press — and possibly from stone to plate, which eases the labour considerably.
28 November 1977
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Frank Hinder has worked in the medium of lithography with integrity, distinction and graphic energy. Although few have had any idea of the extent of his work, still less has there been any possibility of appreciating or evaluating it with informed scrutiny. Its appearance in exhibitions has been scattered but the intentions of the artist have tended towards a careful research for its own sake once he became convinced that the buying public was neither well enough informed to support the print or the radical vision of the world that it presented.
This was around the period of World War II when the modern movement in art was in the hands of a few dedicated and determined practitioners, who, in Sydney, had little expectation of the success their work might achieve but a great faith in what they were doing. At that time Sydney was a pleasant place in which to live, the art scene relatively modest and its members less susceptible to certain destructive elements in the movement of cultural imperialism. Things were simpler, and, in spite of depression and war, there was a more human scale in the perspective of living. The future offered hope if not the certainty of fulfilment.
The period covered in this book, 1939 to 1961, when the artist was most intensely active in the lithographic medium, was crucial in the broad scope of his development. Unlike Athena of mythology who sprang fully formed from the brown of Zeus, an artist has a history of growth and much attendant on this preparation is contained within the success of maturity. Some artist appear to be exceptions to this process, more perhaps because of our lack of knowledge than the singularity of events. In Frank Hinder's case the shaping of his artistic mode bears a distinct relationship to the provenance of experiences that preceded it.
Francis Henry Critchley Hinder was born on the 26th of June 1906, fourth child of Dr. Henry Critchley Hinder and Enid Marguerite Pockley, at a rambling Victorian home, "Carlton" in Summer Hill, Sydney. As a brilliant and successful surgeon, his father could satisfy his love of motor cars. Doctor friends were keen amateur artists and used to arrange sketching excursions. Bellbird Hill, Kurrajong, in those days was the testing circuit for the new fangled motor car and both pleasures could be happily combined.
Frank's first drawing lesson from his father involved the classic conflict of eye versus memory, his flat based cup with elliptical rim being every child's experience of what he knows to be true. He recalls making models, explosives and guns with his elder brother who later became a successful factory manager of British Tobacco. His brother's passions ranged from motor cycles to scale models of steam engines and locomotives. A sister, Lorna, painted elaborate designs composed of rectangles of squares which Frank then copied and coloured. Old exercise books reveal him doing montage around 1912.
An inventory of the family home, scene of much entertaining, included a deer paddock, cow paddock, stream heated hot house, fernery, windmill, a form stable converted to a four car garage and an orchard. The menagerie (Dr. Hinder was a Trustee of the Zoo) of deer, quail, plover, demoiselle cranes, parrots and finches, fish in two fernery tanks, dogs and a cocky, no doubt engendered that graphic facility in the representation of animals which has sustained some of his most memorable images. The family chauffeur introduced him to the elements of mechanics, to the handling, one might say, of the playing with aspects of technology later to prove indispensable in the construction of luminal kinetic sculpture.
Art has a closer association with technology than necessity, both happily springing from a spirit of play. Later at Shore, Frank made an impression on his chemistry teacher by convincingly drawing the apparatus while remaining blissfully ignorant of its function. In this Edwardian household, moderately church of England in its allegiance, supporting accepted middle class values which seemed as self evident and immutable as the British Empire, the atmosphere remained conservative.
Despite his father's amateur interest in sketching, art books or Victorian engravings (which Frank tried to improve), even his nurse's introduction of her small charge to the Art Gallery, home was by no means a flourishing seat of culture.
Father had a surgery in the house and practiced at Burilda Private hospital next door. Henry Hinder toured Europe with his wife in 1910–1911 and brought back Spanish furniture, old master copies, one a Murillo Ascension, and a huge composition of David with the head of Goliath by a French Academician. Henry Hinder died prematurely from an infection at the early age of 48, in 1913. Enid Hinder remarried in 1916 and in 1920 the family moved to Gordon to a smaller house nearer her relatives and where she had been brought up.
It was presumed that, should he show the necessary interest and aptitude, frank should follow in the family tradition and enter a profession. At Newington and Shore, Frank did not perform well academically mostly through lack of application or perhaps he unconsciously harboured his energies for more important activities. His one prize for Divinity so astounded his form master that he checked it several times in disbelief. He gained an Intermediate Certificate and seriously considered going on the land on one of the two properties in which the family had an interest.
His sketching, however, was becoming an absorbing activity and while still at Shore he had enrolled in Dattilo Rubbo's Saturday afternoon classes at the Royal Art Society. In the prevailing climate of "look and put" philosophy Rubbo's injunction, "don't copy, draw it", was almost revolutionary. This was in 1924. In the following year Frank toured britain and several European countries with the band of the Young Australia League.
He had decided by the time that he should enter the study of commercial art as a way to his future, not having any clear idea of other, wider possibilities. At East Sydney Technical College where he worked with fellow student Lyndon Dadswell from 1925–1927 he concentrated on drawing.
By one of those fortunate synchronistic occurrences he obtained very sound advice from a fashion designer named de Treville (a U.S. artist who had studied in Paris) to try the Chicago Art Institute. As it was essential that he supplement assistance from the family with commercial art work, this ruled Paris out owning to a lack of French and uncertainty about work restrictions of foreigners. Having wisely turned down an offer of a studio apprenticeship he sailed for the Uni9ted States, arriving in Chicago on the 18th October 1927.
At the Art Institute, Frank studied composition, the method consisting of arranging geometric elements with restricted tones and colours. There was costume design and life drawing taught by Baron Emil von Forsberg using tones and simplified shapes - interesting and useful but unexplained. Frank attended a summer school on Lake Michigan. He concentrated on drawing, being firmly convinced at the time that a sound basis in drawing was primary. Yet he also felt a little uneasy about the kind of training he was receiving.
Certainly his largely Art Nouveau tastes had been convincingly reshaped by the impact of such masterpieces as Seurat's La Grande Jatte, upstairs in the Institute, a study prompted by the advice of an Irishman named Geraghty, who had offered him commissions, but it was de Treville once more who, on returning to New York, urged him to move there to the School of Fine and Applied Art.
Rooming on the outskirts of Greenwich Village, seeking work with agencies, magazines and book publishers, he studied the commercial Art course. The life classes in the evenings were run by two outstanding teachers who encouraged their students to develop a critical outlook on their work. In a sense each complemented the other.
Howard Giles, the intellectual whose father had been involved with the Swendenborgian Church in the U.S. was a successful illustrator with a firm commitment to painting. Emil Bisttram was a fiery Hungarian, one time pugilist, wrestler, carpenter, commercial artist and painter on the side. Both were friends of Jay Hambidge, author of Dynamic Symmetry, whose influential researches into organic-geometric ordering of space was to have a pervasive influence on Frank's artistic evolution.
Giles and Bisttram were keenly alive to the developments in modern art, which they saw as growing in the direction of classic order from its romantic beginnings. This order was a far cry from the traditional academic viewpoint. Giles had seen the Armory Show of 1913 and aftermath of Synthetic Cubism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism coming in through various dealers' galleries in New York. Students were encouraged to grapple with the implications of such new concepts and at the same time recognise the values of Eastern traditions. Brush drawings in the style of the Zen masters helped to engender that taste for simplicity and directness that later appear in Frank's graphic and watercolour studies.
His teachers in 1929, at the time of the Wall Street Crash and the first plunge into the miserable years of the Great Depression, had been withdrawing from their commitment to commercial art as much as they were from the aims of the school. After a quarrel with the Director they were invited to move to the Master Institute at the Roerich Museum the following year and their talented apprentice was quick to join them. This shift coincided with a new view of the possibilities of art as such even though Frank realised that he would need to either work as a commercial illustrator or teach.
The Roerich Museum housed the paintings of an extraordinary Russian, Nicholas Roerich, visionary, mystic and theosophist who had journeyed with his family through Central Asia for five years, and eventually settled in the Himalayas. Roerich had designed for Diaghilev and his tempera paintings in brilliant colours favoured the simple decorative outlines of stage sets. His presence was even more vivid than his pictures, "marvellous looking chap, smooth egg-shaped face and small beard, wonderful atmosphere", as Frank described him at a lecture. Roerich was trying to launch a world wide organisation for the preservation of culturally significant buildings. In view of subsequent developments his idealism appears exceptionally realistic.
Giles must have been impressed by the progress of his pupil as he arranged for him to take up a part-time teaching appointment with him at the Child-Walker School of Fine Arts in Boston. The tenure from 1931 to 1934, the last two years as a full-time instructor in costume design and pen and ink, gave Frank the necessary security to begin to work seriously on the foundation of his studies with Bisttram and Giles.
The Child-Walker School, founded by Howard Walker and Kathleen Child, had a student membership liberally augmented with daughters of wealthy Bostonians. While a strong Renaissance tradition existed between the courses, design studies approximated the content of Maitland Graves' book on design. Towards the end of their years at the school which culminated in a trip to Florence, students were required to prepare an elaborate version of a fifteenth century Renaissance Cassoni (marriage chest), which not only served its intended function but offered visible proof to future husbands of the culture they had absorbed. When Frank was required to teach tempera painting and master the laborious gesso and egg bound pigment technique, he acquired a taste for finely wrought surfaces and carefully laid texture which was to have a lasting effect on his whole future as a painter. The discipline suited the intellectual control and the shape dominant motifs to which the scope of his visual experience appeared directed.
Frank had made a first commitment with regard to his life as he had met at a summer school at Lake Champlain started by Emil Bisttram, his future wife Margel Ina Harris, herself a talented sculptress from a musical family, who had studied at the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts under Charles Grafley and Frederick Allan. Bisttram's teaching at Moriah made a deep impression on her outlook towards the modern movement and confirmed her decision to follow the exciting new trends she had observed in exhibitions of Gabo, Pevsner and Brancusi. Frank and Margel's marriage in 1930 began a fruitful partnership which was to prove significant in the development of modern art in Australia.
The milieu of Boston seemed hardly less stimulating that that of New York. It was on the circuit of major art exhibitions. The de Basil Ballet Company had performed there during these years but one Indian dancer, Uda Shan-Kar, the Hinders said, "made ballet look like cheap vaudeville!". Eastern influences were strong in magnificent Oriental holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg at Harvard no less than in the presence of distinguished scholars like Coomaraswamy who presided over the Museum's collection on Dr. Denman Ross at Harvard, who likewise, discreetly bought some of the finest material available at the time.
There was the Helen Gardiner Museum, a transhipped Renaissance palace with outstanding pictures and furniture, and the growing collections of the modern art that the Boston Museum was in the process of acquiring to stimulate years of study. When the Hinders returned to Sydney it was perhaps the dearth of stimulating exhibitions, performances and major collections that was the most noticeable.
One of the lecturers at the Child-Walker School, Peter Kilham who taught furniture design and whose father happened to have a small farm in New Hampshire suggested that he and the Hinders begin an experimental art colony. Membership was deliberately restricted to four students, though others were to join later. It tried to combine the high purpose of art with an attempt to grow most of the necessary food on a small half-acre plot. The latter effort was rescued from disaster by the kindness of a neighbouring farmer who knew the ways of the land infinitely better than any newcomer. Margel acted as chaperone and cook. Her routine began at 4:30am. The other rose for breakfast and discussion at 5:00am, three hours were spent gardening followed by five hours' free work. She remembers having to put socks on the hands of her small child as snow still lay around in June. It was all very simple, idealistic and earnest. In 1930 Emil Bisttram moved out to Taos, New Mexico, home of Pueblo Indians and the final resting place of D. H. Lawrence. Frieda Lawrence was still there at this time, but the attraction to artists was the landscape of desert forms, the light and the colourful mixture of Indian and Spanish colonial relics, both architectural and ceremonial.
American painters like John Sloan and pioneer abstractionist Georgia O'Keefe helped establish Taos as an art Mecca. The Hinders attended Bisttram's Summer School in 1933. Frank remembers seeing Bisttram's studio full of pictures influenced by the Mexican, Diego Rivera, whose politically controversial murals had recently been destroyed in the Rockefeller Centre, New York. Bisttram would never have shown these works, being concerned to use this experience under a powerful influence for other ends. Years later he moved into abstract expressionism and gained a reputation as the most influential teacher in the West.
Frank exhibited in Taos, his only showing in the U.S. apart from the drawings based on dynamic symmetry he put up in a Boston bookshop in April 1933, and participation in an exhibition of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art.
With the deepening Depression and the difficulties of surviving the unpaid vacation periods at the Child-Walker School, the Hinders were thinking about returning to Australia even though the art scene was as interesting as ever. Rumours were circulating from the direction of New York of an exciting new school run by one Hans Hofman, but under the circumstances there was no immediate possibility of further delaying their departure. They sailed from New York on a freighter direct to Brisbane.
Sydney had not changed a great deal except that financially things would be difficult for some time to come. After nine months in frank's mothers house the Hinders moved into a flat in Wollstonecraft and a studio in Bridge Street while immediately seeking work in the commercial art field.
A close association developed over the years with Rah Fizelle, Grace Crowley and to a less extent, Ralph Balson. Crowley and Fizelle had a studio, now a derelict, at 219 George Street near the Quay. Fizelle had been in France during the Great War, but it was Grace Crowley who introduced him to the elements of Cubism she had studied with Geleizes in Paris in the late twenties. Fizelle's broad landscapes in watercolour based on cubist adaptations of the principles of dynamic symmetry immediately influenced Frank's own approach to that medium. Artists of the period whose painting were particularly remembered include the early Wakelin, Grace Cossington Smith and the watercolourists John D. Moore and Kenneth MacQueen.
The Hinders had found in Gerald Lewers one of the few sculptors in touch with what was happening in Europe and in sympathy with the modern movement. These artists all had something in common, brought as it was from the polarities of the Old and New World.
Later, Frank painted with Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson at her studio a few doors away from Fizelle's near the Army and Navy store on the corner of Margaret Street. Her training with Geleizes and Andre L'Hote enabled her to transmit a new theoretical approach to painting. The effect on artists like Ralph Balson was to free them completely from the restraints of representation. Later, the coalition of Crowley and Balson had a memorable contribution to make in the sphere of abstract art right up to the 1950s and 1960s.
This small group of painters and sculptors represented a tiny fraction of the movement of the times, dominated by the naturalism of the Royal Art Society and to a lesser extent the more liberal view of the Society of Artists.
It appeared very modest when one looked back to events in America. Some activities were not so far away, like the Anthroposiphist Lute Drummond's theatre at Castlecrag (the Hinders here fascinated by the performances of Eurythmy they had seen in Boston), but the general tenor of Australian society was as culturally bereft as it was extrovert.
Frank began to work in theatre, with Mary Hollingworth in the design of sets and costumes, a preoccupation which profoundly influenced his handling of light and transparency in painting and printmaking.
The reception of his one man show at the Grosvenor Galleries in 1937 by the dominant critic of the time, Howard Ashton, was predictably abrasive but Ashton, who was also the music critic on the Sydney Sun later paid him the backhanded compliment of linking his work "like that of Bartok: which smells of drains!". It was not until the following year that he pai9nted his first non-objective work, the year the Hinders took over the running of the Grosvenor Galleries. This brought them in touch with many of the more popular artists of the times including Hans Heysen and Elioth Gruner. However much their artistic aims diverged, Frank was to discover their personalities to be fascinating and sympathetic. Small studies by Gruner he came to value for their purely aesthetic qualities. The Hinders attempted to extend the range of client buying by introducing watercolours and drawings by Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff and Kathe Kollowitz but to no avail.
Strong influence came from the theoretician and sculptor Eleanore Lange who had been brought up in the mainstream of Central European ideas, liberally flavoured by the doctrines of Hildebrandt and Von Stuck in Munich. She applied mathematical theories to the phenomenon of colour and formulated intriguing experiments with colour in sculpture, but, as Frank observed, could not find the financial support to carry them out. This situation did little credit to the attitude of wealthy Australian, who by comparison with their American counterparts, matched gross materialism with exceptional meanness towards the arts. Eleanore Lange's lectures brought an hitherto unprecedented Germanic thoroughness and intellectual rigour to bear on the problems of modernism. Her theories deserve a better hearing than they have so far received. Lange's influence survived in the experiments with light and colour Frank made to the 1960s and 1970s.
By the time Frank was organising Exhibition 1, with Eleanore Lange, the first in Australia of abstract art, he was producing more painting than he had ever done before. The experience of working on a large scale wall decoration at Prince's Restaurant in 1938, and murals for the Commonwealth Bank, Ashfield and the Australian Pavilion at the New Zealand Fair, Wellington 1939, had given him greater confidence in shifting his attention from the purely graphic. However, the same year he purchased a lithographic press and began to produce a number of prints and monotypes. This was on the ever of the War when he assisted into being, with Peter Bellew, the New South Wales Branch of the Contemporary Art Society.
The disruption of the war which affected everyone to a greater or lesser degree, meant a sustained interruption to large scale works. Although years of restriction lay ahead there was one last event which burst upon the Australian art scene with magnificent force, the Herald Art Exhibition of Modern Masters.
Already, too, there were artists who had passed through the George Bell School in Melbourne who were appearing in Sydney: Jean Bellette, Paul Haefliger, David Strachan, Russell Drysdale and Sali Herman. The work of Eric Wilson and Roi de Maistre was perhaps the most interesting to Frank and he regretted that he had no contact with either. Prints were beginning to appear in the few bookshops that took art seriously: Miss Morrison's Roycroft Bookshop in Rowe Street; the Craftsman and later Carl Plate's Notanda Gallery. These became the principal sources of information on overseas developments.
Frank worked with a number of designers and illustrators whose contributions to their respective fields has since become well known: Douglas Annand, Gordon Andrews, Dahl and Geoff Collings, Ronald Steuart, Alistair Morrison.
From 1939 to 1944 Frank worked in camouflage. Professor Dakin, zoologist and ichthyologist, organised the department under the title of Home Security as an offshoot of the Department of the Interior in Canberra. John D. Moore was in charge of the State section and a number of artists became involved: Eric thompson, William Dobell (his paintings in the War Memorial, Canberra are a record), Sali Herman, Robert Emerson Curtis and James Cook among them.
Frank and Margel were required at one stage to move to Canberra. They constructed dummy aircraft and prototype camouflage for hideouts, pipelines, ammunition dumps and factories.
When Frank became instructor with the Army he was stationed at Georges Heights, researched into the camouflage of bulk storage tanks and was consulted by the Navy. Margel made models of enemy aircraft and ships for instruction in identification and training films.
Frank travelled frequently as consultant, principally Townsville, Queensland, Rottnest, Western Australian and Rabaul, where he narrowly escaped injury or death when his aircraft crashed on takeoff.
His recollections of these years are liberally salted with Catch 22 situations which only the Army could devise. When he returned to civilian life he hoped that his lithographs might find an outlet in Carl Plate's Notanda Gallery, where they had to compete with prints by Paul Nash and Henry Moore — unfavourably with regard to price as it turned out. Another effort in the shape of a group of satirical drawings of Sydney life did not find the right publisher although incisive line and bubbling humour have not dated them in the least.
There were dramatic clashes in the struggle to wrest the Contemporary Art Society from political control, and the greater effort to mature his art amid the continuing struggle to earn a living. One thing was certain, thought he did succeed through teaching and commissions, he was his own man. The artist he never really set out to be had arrived.
The collection of lithographs featured in this volume covers the period 1939 to 1961, but the greater part were executed during or just after the War. It is complete as far as existing works and at one time the artist kept a detailed record of the stages of execution and printing, temperatures, acids, surfaces and inks. This enabled him to build up a working knowledge of technique and to locate the variables which might make all the difference, both as to scope and finish of the final print.
The distinction must be drawn between an artist who may work on a plate or stone, and the printmaker who is personally informed, as well as participatory of each stage in the technical process. Frank Hinder is a printmaker by this definition, applying his knowledge of process wherever he could, but even the printing trades courses at the Sydney Technical College were impenetrable except by committed apprentices. This was a pity as the proofing methods taught there were identical with the methods of studio practice.
Perhaps the most attractive feature of the art of lithography exploited very early on in the development of Senefelder's useful discovery, is its range of subtle grey tonalities and fine texture, reflecting as it does the grinding of the stone or sensitizing of the plate. The stone had the advantage of pressing the paper quite smooth and recording the finest movement of the crayon to the exactness of a silverpoint drawing.
Later developments of tusche and colour have added new dimensions to the art but in the case of Frank Hinder he has restricted the uses of colour and has stuck to traditional methods of technique however far his images may be experimental or improvisatory. No fine line can be drawn between the kinds of imagery he was developing in the practice of other media and in lithography. many compositions were to find a form in several mediums, given that he was able to produce little or no large scale works during the war years and felt at the end of it that the continuity, if any, had only been maintained by his persistence with drawing and printmaking.
Of the two distinctive streams of geometry in modern art, one might point to their connection as one of meaning and quanta. Geometry for Kadinsky, Mondrian and Malevich and the Cubists mean emancipation from the materialism of the senses and an attempt to create a self sufficient universe of order, meaning spiritual values and the creation of a language of forms capable of sustaining such ideas in purely visual terminology.
The second use of geometry is closely connected with the first, but is secularised in the sense that technology is from knowledge for its own sake. Like technology this geometric language is a substitute of shapes for symbolic content and can be manipulated for its own possibilities and exclusive of any intended meaning. It has the added advantage of linking with the formalistic and pattern making obsessions of modern thinking, and in one sense is a visualisation of such processes. Visual systems take precedence over imaginative or symbolic structures. This type of visual thinking also, like its counterpart in the culture of the 20th century, stand contra to naturalism on the one hand and symbolic content on the other, although at any stage the one can lead to the other, depending on the artist.
Frank had gravitated quite widely in his use of structure from a purely formal support to a dynamic which has symbolic and imaginative overtones. This latter view would have its origins in the Platonism of Giles and Bisttram, and the organic aestheticism of dynamic symmetry. Images that emerge from this ordering process have been thoroughly transmuted from their naturalistic sources. On occasions he produces a numinous archetypal image, and yet on others, translates a realistic subject into partly formalised visual structure. When content meets inner processes we have what E. M. Forster described as letting a bucket into consciousness and drawing up something which is normally beyond reach. The mixture of this with surface experience makes the work of art.
Yet another element in the lithographs might be described as a latent expressionism, an urge towards feeling tensions or intensity and infusion of the resulting images with these tensions and, especially, stress filled movements. This, perhaps, has direct connections with Frank's fascination in the 1930s with the graphic power of Orozco's work and his attempt to formulate powerful icons of human suffering and triumph. These subjects are intermittent eruptions within the fairly contained and contemplative mood of most of the lithographs, but expose facets of the artist's personality which less obviously colour them. Uppermost in the first prints pulled in 1939 is a sense of restrained humour of exploration and compression dominant ideas he was exploring at the time. Perhaps the most successful, the composition of yachts, and a fisherman, place subjects within a world of overlapping transparences and movements, like a stone in a setting. Frank's meticulous procedures are evidenced by the careful adjustment of shape between three versions of yachts, or the careful control he exercises in the composition of furnacemen, which could stand as a model for Maitland Graves' exercise in design. Fisherman found exquisitely economical translation into watercolour. There are straightforward portraits, the first of a series of cats, and a low keyed tilt at the bumbledom of the New South Wales Gallery Trustees trying to pontificate on the selection of work of art bout which they can know very little in proportion to the ego inflation which their status provides them.
In the Tram anticipates the highly important urban crowd scenes of the late 1940s. The first prints to be executed at the end and immediately after World War II, were few, as one might expect after an enforced break in continuity of effort. Nevertheless, many important compositions had been effectively germinating and within a year had burst forth with greater authority and maturity than could be envisaged in 1939. 1945 saw two portraits: one of Gerald Lewers and a self portrait in sombre chiaroscuro, as well as formal compositions entitled Rock Pool and The Bathers, later coloured by hand, a relaxed celebration of an ubiquitous peacetime event.
The years 1946 and 1947 saw quite a watershed of prints realising notes made before and during the war, and surfacing complex feelings in visual form.
One of the more prominent entitled Christian Civilization raises interesting questions as to religious commitment and represents the kind of protest against the destructive aspects of religion as an instrument of power and greed. Some of the tensely Baroque features of this print belong to the artist's study of Orozco's images of the 1930s.
With the revival of Social Realism in Sydney at this time it may be wondered whether these and others with a realist flavour might not have come from similar sources. The theme follows clearly in Christ is With Us. The Crucified Christ intended as a weathervane is framed by the gigantic skull of Golgotha and by implication is being recrucified by the confusing and conflicting figures of priest, preacher, soldier and bishop. The hovering Christ is reminiscent of quatrocento Italian compositions of St. Francis receiving the Stigmata. It perhaps clarified for the artist his notions of churchianity and the universality of the truth it obscures. The reverse of this print differs only in the value of contrasting tones.
The relaxed atmosphere of Office Staff, Canberra evokes a reminiscence of the days in camouflage. It is an investigation of patterns of movement and tension of a familiar daily event, made explicit by setting the racy clutch of cyclists against a spaced out line of trees. The second print evokes a deeper sensation of space, the details are subtly differentiated and more effective in the design; two kinds of dynamics, one less formal than the other.
The quality of movement in urban crowds represented a much more serious concern. Some of these groups move against a framework of architecture. In the most original, Subway, two hermetic spaces are linked by an ascending wedge of forceful image. A second offset overprint in greyed red densifies the effect of crowds in movement. No other artist at this time in Australia was able to make capital out of such seemingly intractable material.
Cocktail Party, 1947, has the style and humour of a New Yorker illustration, neatly dissecting the social scene. It is based on a careful group of line drawings of two years previously which Frank had made up into a book. It affords useful insight into the life style of the late 1940s and the artist's fine perception of character.
Among the charming series of animal prints over several years, which likewise fuse meticulous drawing with an eye for eccentric detail and character, cats and birds predominate. Chooks plays with the unity of movement as one might see it in a Chinese drawing, grouping and fusing one form with another, allowing the silhouette its optimum role, accenting points of alarm and curiousity.
Bird Emerging and Small Animal use another far-reaching linear gesture to centre a more universal image in its own light generating space. The Bird and Snake and the Water Bird strive for an archetypal economy of form which is both crystalline and mysterious. Like all successful abstractions they have a powerful life of their own and present movements of illumination in the pendulum swing of the imaginative process in which the artist's skills are at the apogee.
The various prints of cats exploit sensuous rhythms with the candour of Kaligat brush drawings and retain them however abstract the composition becomes.
Most elaborate of all the animal prints, however, is the series devoted to owls in 1948. They include one small work on celluloid, but otherwise extemporise on a subtle rang of grey tones, equally expressive of the qualities of the lithographic medium as the texture of the subjects. Frogmouth Family progresses in degrees of formality to a stage of graphic and compositional economy. The disappearance of overall tone liberates the whites to clarify shapes of birds, branches and leaves. The feeling and treatment might recall a Franz Marc, and evoke a pervasive disquiet not unlike his.
While an expressionist quality of some intensity animates the religious subjects and to an extent Advance, serenity pervades the gently curvilinear rhythms of Madonna and Child. It foreshadows in part the composition of Frank's Black Prize winning painting of 1952 Flight into Egypt. Clearly his method of evolving composition is subtle and painstaking and the graphic activity is the key.
The largest prints in this collection are non-figurative, Frank's energies now being directed to painting, theatre design and teaching, with assistance from time to time given to Margel's sculpture commissions. As one might expect, the two embody the polarities of his abstract style; the one Interweave, a beautiful, restless but flattened vision on interpenetrating spaces, a revolving perspex sculpture, blending and overlapping in a pristine linear universe: the other Reversed Image, a doppelganger of refractive prisms, a questioning mirror of repeated forms, sharply angular and assertive. Both relate strongly to pictures of the period and reinforce the impressions of solid achievement, skill and integrity in the wider focus of the artist's oeuvre.
Esmeralda transmutes the other, more realistic sources of inspiration into a powerful dynamic of visual essentials; structure, coherence, motion, depth and reflection. It is one of those very rare prints which effortlessly evokes a sense of light and colour.
In discussing some of the essential prints of the greater number reproduced in this book, one feels strongly that Frank Hinder's graphic production not only remains integral to the study of his work in other media, but deserves recognition as an important if neglected aspect of the history of the modern movement in Australia, and of one of its most distinguished exponents.
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Frank Hinder: Lithographs was published in 1978 by Odana Editions. Lin Bloomfield researched and edited the book and the Introduction was written by John Henshaw. Both Lin's Editor's Note and John's Introduction plus an essay by Frank titled My Experiences in Lithography are all reproduced here.