Design and Art Australia Online

painter, cartoonist, commercial artist and singer, was born in Perth, eldest of six children. His father, an ardent supported of the Labor Party, worked for most of his life as a wood engraver; his mother loved music, and his uncle was Alexander McClintock (1869-1922), a part-time painter associated with the Heidelberg School. In 1912 the family moved to Adelaide, then to Heidelberg, outside Melbourne. Herbert began his career as an apprentice process engraver and sign writer. His commercial art included doing the process engraving for The Art of Harold Herbert . He later worked as a signwriter, then got a job where a condition of employment was to study at the Melbourne NGV School. He studied painting under Bernard Hall and William McInnes (1925-27, acc. McCulloch). Fellow students were George Bell , Eric Thake and James Flett . The four met together in the bohemian Fasoli’s Cafe in King Street on Friday nights, with Roy Dalgarno , Judah Waten, Dominic Leon , Bill Dolphin etc.

McClintock left Melbourne in 1927 and found a job as a commercial artist on the Sydney Morning Herald . He joined a Neitschean group of social protest artists in Sydney (including Ray and Phil Lindsay and George Finey ) before returning to Melbourne late in 1929 to re-enrol at the National Gallery School and revive old friendships, especially at the Swanston Family Hotel where he met Noel Counihan and Nutter Buzacott. He also joined the Communist Party. In July 1930 he first exhibited his art in a show of work by young bohemian gallery students including Flett and Thake called The Embryos , held at Melbourne’s Little Gallery. His painting called Me was reproduced in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail .

In October 1930 McClintock was art editor of Strife (with Judah Waten as literary editor), a magazine advocating immediate revolution and the violent overthrow of moribund institutions, including art galleries. The magazine’s artists were Counihan, Flett and Buzacott; the writers, Bernard Burns, Brian Fitzpatrick and Colin Wills as well as Waten; financial assistance was provided by Pat Stanley. Published in support of unemployment relief, it consisted of one number only – and police seized most of the copies as they were handed out. McClintock and Waten were given a day to leave Melbourne and when they didn’t go were arrested for vagrancy. (The charges were later dropped.) 'Mac’ finally left Melbourne in 1931. After two years wandering the country looking for work, he ended up back in Sydney. There he met Pat, who was working in a legal office. They married in Brisbane on 8 September 1933, then moved to Perth (later they divorced). While he worked in advertising at the Daily News Pat organised exhibitions for him and his friends. His painting flourished in Perth, changing from constructivism to surrealism. He used the pseudonym 'Max Ebert’ for these paintings because he already had a promising career as a singer as 'McClintock’. His paintings became notorious in the late 1930s when surrealism was the subject of heated debate – which 'Ebert’ loved.

After holding his first solo show in 1939, McClintock returned to Melbourne in 1940 with the writer John Hepworth. He stayed at Warrandyte with his sister Winnie and his new brother-in-law Buzacott, met Vassilieff, helped with the CAS then returned to Sydney, presumably via Perth. (His oil painting Strange Oversight signed 'Max Ebert’ 1940, p.c., reproduced in Merewether, was exhibited at Newspaper House, Perth in July 1940.) He showed surrealist work at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in September 1940. The show was opened by George Finey and a feature article on it, 'Dreams Inspire Australia’s Art’, appeared in Pix on 28 September 1940, 7.

During WWII McClintock was rejected for active service on medical grounds and conscripted into an iron foundry. Later he was moved to camouflage. In July 1943 he began work with the Allied Works Council and Civil Construction Corps, painting images of labour beside William Dobell. He used a new, far more social-realist style and his own name. A 1944 series of paintings of labouring men used rhythmic repetitions suggestive of musical harmonies. He also painted images of the suburban street and the monotonous domestic life of the cities, eg Street Scene 1944, oil on board exhibited SORA July 1947, now AGNSW (repro. B. Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition and in Merewether). A founding member of SORA (1945-50), he gave art lessons to members; Len Fox was among his oil painting students in the late 1940s (Fox, 133).

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s McClintock was a prolific cartoonist for trade union and communist publications, including the Maritime Worker , The Boilermaker and Building Workers . He held his second solo exhibition in 1947, by which time he had moved out of the city and was living at Freeman’s Reach, later at Kurrajong. He continued to contribute cartoons to trade union papers and especially to the Communist Party’s Tribune , for which he drew a weekly cartoon in the late 1940s-50s, eg “Quick, wire Mr Menzies and have that man declared!” Tribune 1950 (man painting a post box red, ill. King, 162, & attributed to 'McLintock’ [sic]; also p.166). Len Fox notes (p.133):

he used to come in to Tribune office every week to get instructions for next week’s cartoon. I felt sorry for Mac; it seemed to me that every week we gave him dull instructions that could only lead to a dull, stereotyped cartoon, and yet we expected him by some miracle to produce something new and startling. But he never complained; he always turned up with a well-executed drawing – the best that he could create.

Crib Time 1970 (used on the cover of Len Fox’s 1996 book) was first published in Common Cause [of the Coalminers] , where he did regular illustrations from at least 1949 (when Graeme Byrne has identified a cartoon). Len Fox got to know him there from 1958, when Fox joined the paper. Edgar Ross and Fox got to know him well since he regularly dropped in to discuss possibilities for the next week’s cartoon once more.

Sometimes, instead of asking Mac to draw a narrowly political cartoon, we would ask him to do a drawing to illustrate a scene in Australian history, Australia’s first May Day procession in 1891 at Barcaldine in Queensland, for instance, when more than 600 of the shearers and other workers in the procession were on horseback, or the NSW South Coast miners and their womenfolk stopping a train-load of strikebreakers headed for the Mount Kembla mine back in 1887. Mac put a lot of work into these; some of them, I am sure, will live as part of the record of Australian working class history. (As I write this, his 1891 May Day drawing is being exhibited at the “Artists and Rebels on the Waterfront” exhibition at Sydney’s Tom Nelson Hall; it is also included, with other McClintock drawings, in the booklet May Day – 100 Years of Struggle published in 1986 by the Sydney May Day Committee. One of his drawings in this booklet is a call for peace in Vietnam in 1968; McClintock’s drawings and cartoons were an important part of the campaign to end the Vietnam war.) (Fox, 135)

For some years 'Mac’ produced banners for May Day marches as well as continuing to paint landscapes. After a trip to the NT, Aboriginal subjects dominated his late work. He did illustrations for Overland , e.g. Burning the Licences, 1854 , cover of Eureka Centenary Issue no.2 (Summer 1954-55). In 1960 he was one of four Australian artists whose work was shown in the USSR (Fox). Late in life he returned to singing, now in duets with his second wife, Marie, a singer with the Australian Opera Company. He also wrote on music and art for Tribune .

'In mid-1976 he spent two months with his son and daughter-in-law Malcolm and Vivienne who were working at the Amata settlement among the Pitjintjara Aboriginals. He did much drawing and painting there’ (Fox 134), e.g. Old Man and His Dog, Amata . A large retrospective of McClintock’s art was held at 27 Niagara Lane Galleries, Melbourne, in September 1980 (see review by Andrew McKay, Australian 16 September 1980).

There are two original McClintock cartoons in the SLNSW ML Bulletin collection, one of 1936 and another of 1930 showing two unemployed men in the Botanic Gardens, captioned If he were king! '“If you was Mussolini, Bert, what’s the first thing you’d do?”/ “Up’olster the blanky park seats”’ (ML PX*D488/128). His more schematic, propagandist cartoon of the unemployed in the Botanic Gardens in Strife became better known (although artistically inferior), being reproduced in left-wing publications both in Australia and abroad, according to Merewether (I think). He also did a good cartoon of the censor banning a film about peace, published in the Guardian (Melbourne) on 21 February 1952 (ill. Senyard, 83).

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007