recto: (Female figure) verso: Margel

This double-sided drawing is a portrait of the artist's wife, Margel Hinder, and a figure study of a seated woman, most likely also Margel. Both drawings reveal Hinder’s adoption of salon cubist principles, in which his subjects were rendered using compositional principles derived from dynamic symmetry – that is, a method of composition in which mathematical principles were applied to natural form. Unlike some of his contemporaries who moved wholly into non-objective art (such as Grace Crowley), Hinder made both figurative and non-figurative works in tandem in the 1930s and 40s. Geometry, however, was a constant, in this case giving an observed form (that is, the figure) a unifying cohesiveness and order.