Frank Hinder was a Sydney cartoonist, illustrator, painter and printmaker. He was born on 26 June 1906 at Summer Hill, NSW. He had art lessons from his father, an amateur painter, and attended the Royal Art Society of NSW School in 1924, East Sydney Technical College in 1925-27, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927-28, New York School of Fine Arts 1929 and the Master Institute of the Roerich Museum, NY, in 1930-31. Although best known as a painter (see Free) and a lithographer (see Bloomfield), he also did cartoons, graphic and advertising art in 1934-64. While in the USA in the early 1930s he contributed drawings to the New Yorker and to a Boston journal ( Boston Breeze ?), including a drawing of an American street crowd (Mitchell Library). He married Margel Harris in the US and they returned to Sydney in 1934.
In 1936 Frank illustrated Alice in Wonderland (the 4th Australian “Alice”). The Mitchell Library’s James Hardie Childhood collection includes his 'Hunting of the Snark’, with a lengthy series of b/w pencil drawings developing a drawing of the captain with a map 'that was a perfect blank’, based on a type of Golden Section theory about spirals and nested rectangles copyrighted by Fanning.
In the 1940s Hinder drew cartoons in Australia: National Journal , e.g. May 1947, and Australia Week-end Book 5 (1946), 13: “M’dear! Just one of those days you can’t call your lavatory your own!” (demented woman on phone with children’s party going on in the background) and p.196 (on dogs). An excellent ink drawing titled Frustrated artist shows a cartoonist (who looks like Hinder) at a drawing board and a man (who looks like George Lambert ) saying: 'Funny drawings, eh? I do them myself sometimes – but I put mine in the waste-paper basket’ c.1946, published Australia: National Journal . The original was included in the S.H. Ervin 1999 b/w art show (courtesy King Street Gallery, Sydney) with his matching drawing Universal Youth : “I know I’m right! – but I just can’t explain myself – not even to myself” c.1947, done for the same journal.
A coloured pencil drawing offered Deutscher-Menzies 1 May 2001, lot 180 (col. Ill, est. $700-1,000) Margo Draws a Vertebrae , inscribed 'Penrith – 45 F.C.H’, is a clever little portrait of Margo Lewers (a visually joke about her abstracting natural motifs). A good pen on vellum simple line nude appeared in Josef Lebovic Collectors’ List 1996 no.56, cat.26.
Further information:
Frank Hinder (1906-1992), a painter, was interested in movement and rhythm in art and the truth behind appearances. He described his Construction painting as “trying to express a back-and-forth movement on the picture plain and he was strongly influenced by new scientific theories of his time, including Jay Hambridge’s 1902 book, Dynamic Symmetry (on the underlying order in natural forms). In 1930, he married Margel Hinder, a New York-born sculptor, in Boston, MA, and returned to Sydney with her in 1934.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2015
