Hinder first came to notice as part of a small circle of Sydney moderns committed to international abstraction in Exhibition 1, inauspiciously launched the month before the outbreak of war in 1939. Along with Margel Hinder, Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson, Gerald Lewers, Rah Fizelle, and the German emigrée Eleonore Lange they pursued modernism, reading what they could find of Mondrian and Kandinsky, like a cell of true believers. Lange lived at this time with the Hinders in a flat above their garage, which their daughter Enid Hawkins (née Hinder) recalls being ‘like wonderland, with huge windows facing the western sunset and a row of glass prisms along the window sill – magic’. Free’s research on Hinder’s early abstractions from this time – mainly modest work on paper – nonetheless makes the achievements of the legendary ‘first abstract art exhibition’ by Balson of 1941 look not quite so lonely.

The most fascinating part of the book lies in the account of Hinder’s remarkable expatriate years when in 1927, against the grain of most of his contemporaries, he went to the Art Institute of Chicago rather than to London or Paris in search of an art education. There he saw Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, and Thomas Wilfred’s coloured lights performed on his Clavilux, a prescient moment for the future artist of Luminal Kinetics. Then in 1929 he moved to New York to work in commercial art, which coincided with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art and the stock market crash. There he saw the peinture changeante of the Cubist Archipenko and learned of Jay Hambridge’s ideas on dynamic symmetry, a system of proportions for constructing a painting. Both would inform his later practice.

Frank and Margel Hinder also dabbled in the ‘counter-culture’ movements of the time, from artist communes to the ideas of Rudolph Steiner. In 1933 they stayed in the bohemian colony at Taos, New Mexico, where they saw the murals of Diego Rivera and Pueblo Indian culture. Hinder later recalled elaborate Pueblo dance ceremonies ‘with their feet, apparently drawn to the earth by some force … Our Aborigines, to me, give the same sensation.’ This experience led to Hinder’s most complex design to date, a late Cubist drawing that, like Seurat’s fascination with performers, brought classical order to rhythmic movement, though his subject was not Parisian but Dance of the Koshares, New Mexico (1933). That same year Hinder produced an exquisite watercolour entitled Abstract, his first non-objective work.It balances different saturations of blue and orange in elongated geometric shapes that form concentric arcs around negative spaces of black and white. As Free observes, ‘all the elements of Hinder’s future developments were already present in his American period’. For the rest of his life, Hinder moved between abstraction and the figurative, restlessly exploring ways to renew his art. While semi-abstract images of the city and the crowd preoccupied him in the postwar decades, when a younger generation of hard edge and colour field painters were emerging in the late 1960s, he returned to a school of Paris abstraction, expressing his dilemma in the title Ambivalent (1968).

Hinder is credited as one of the authors of the monograph; his unpublished manuscript, Early Life and Memories, and his diaries play a central role in the text. At times the book reads like a conversation between old friends, with the artist’s words completing the author’s sentences. However, given the centrality of Hinder’s writings, including what Free refers to as his Bible – a scrapbook of sources also regularly cited – it is disappointing that they are neither referenced in any systematic way, nor even reproduced. The Acknowledgments informs us that such documentation as exhibitions and bibliography is online. However, this unscholarly approach leads to oversights or omissions. For instance, Hinder’s work on camouflage during the war has been the subject of several articles by Ann Elias, shortly to be published as a book; Free makes no mention of this research. Herein lies the problem: being so long in the making, it awkwardly straddles both the digital age and the constraints of friendship.

Australian artists, particularly those involved with international movements such as Abstraction, lack serious study: for example, no monographs, let alone catalogues raisonnés, exist on such seminal figures as Balson, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Sam Atyeo, J.W. Power, or, for that matter, Margel Hinder. One notable exception is the eloquent account by Bruce Adams, Rustic Cubism: Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly Sabata (2004). Adams made brilliant use of Dangar’s extensive letters to Grace Crowley. By comparison to this landmark work of scholarship that brought a marginal woman modernist into international consideration, this new book will not do a great deal to change the perception of Hinder’s art.

Take for instance Free’s writing on Hinder’s Luminal Kinetics, the seminal works of his late career. Free links them to Wilfred’s coloured light performances, which he saw in Chicago, while Henshaw makes connections to his work in lighting and theatre design, most notably several experimental projects as part of the Adelaide Festival, in collaboration with another local exponent of light art, Stan Ostoja Kotkowski. While both of these accounts enrich our understanding, nothing but the most peripheral reference is made to the kinetic art of the late 1950s and 1960s. It is significant that this international movement, involving many Latin American and European artists, was first seen locally in 1968 as part of the Power Bequest Exhibition in Australia Square, the year after Hinder began his Luminal Kinetics.

As the book adopts a chronological narrative, the last two decades of Hinder’s life, when he returned to painting both abstractions and late Cubist academic portraits of his friends and family, form part of the final chapter. The portraits retreat from any experiment, not uncommon in late work, like the otherwise brilliant career of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. However, the inclusion of such minor works, including portraits of both biographers and the artist’s dealer, does no justice to Hinder’s considerable achievements. Other questions an editor should have addressed are the unnecessary doubling up of images (Dance of the Koshares), the use of Wikipedia, the repeated misspelling of Moholy-Nagy, as well as other typos.

Free’s strength is her firsthand knowledge of the artist and access to the estate, but her conversational style frustrates any systematic referencing of Hinder’s writing, and thereby of his art and times (for instance, the wider context of kinetic art). While this style is undoubtedly appealing to the layperson, to an art historian the absence of footnotes and indexing curtails a richer understanding of the art.