Arthur McIntyre with his work at Mori Gallery solo exhibition Drawing into Painting, 1985

Arthur McIntyre, a stark black, brown and white action man, views the world as slithery outpourings or eruptions of incandescence over the darkness of chaos.

W.E. Pidgeon, Sunday Telegraph, 16 February 1975, p 93.

With the exception of Elwyn Lynn there are few painters here who can extract such passion from the dustbins of life. These spongy metaphors for blemished flesh are chilling reminders of human vulnerability. They belong to a European tradition of morbid curiosity, reflected in Gericault’s corpses, in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, in Alberto Burri’s wounded, stitched and bleeding bags.

Nancy Borlase, Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday 4 March 1976, p 7

In his use of photo-collage, he comes close to the fantasy and protest themes of the German Dadaists, John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann. His formally cohesive, bitter images of erotic hedonism, with their dislocated time/space relationships, convey a similar sense of moral indignation.

Nancy Borlase, ‘McIntyre’s new breadth of vision’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 March 1977, p.7

Arthur McIntyre at Gerstman Gallery examines the fleshy destiny of human beings from womb to tomb… Arthur McIntyre goes back to origins, the embryo and the forming flesh, the dry leathery skin of old bodies and the macabre contemplation of joyless anatomy. This is all backed with sombre gestural washes and pasted-up objects – repeated feathers, Muybridge’s photos, textbook scraps – and produces a brooding germanic effect. The range is narrow, and all the stronger for this.

Ronald Millar, The Australian, 20 April 1978, p.8.

Arthur McIntyre… has always been something of a gadfly in print and … a master of theatrical montage.

Elwyn Lynn, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 27-28 September 1986, p.10

Arthur McIntyre can congratulate himself for being an artist of the melancholic macabre and the inevitable.

Elwyn Lynn, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 27-28 June 1987, p.12

You are one of those rare people who can understand collage with a developed sensibility. You have done an awful lot to make people visually aware and I am thankful for your contribution.

Robert Klippel, in a letter to Arthur McIntyre, 21 November 1994

For me, one of the most powerful exhibits is Arthur McIntyre’s Monument to Intimacy – The Last Embrace, consisting of a single life-scale skeletal drawing and an immaculate coffin. It in part refers to his earlier installation Riddle of the Tombs of 1987, and in part to the death of Sydney art director Garry Anderson. It is a sombre and evocative work which, as the artist reminds us, relates to the Freudian notion that the “aim of all life is death”.

Sasha Grishin reviewing Arthur McIntyre’s work in Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS at National Gallery of Australia, 1994-95 (“Restraint replaces horror”, Canberra Times, 6 December 1994).

I have noticed over the years how the successive waves of world art have been reflected in what Arthur McIntyre has done. The work occasionally grew bare and simple. Occasionally, it was very gestural. It reflected everybody’s interest in the images you can pick up from the world around you and stick down onto a canvas, or a piece of paper. I could also notice the way in which he is heir to a great deal of what has gone on in Sydney during his lifetime, and mine. I believe that we have here a painter who has taken in the message of the painterly aspects of Sydney painting over a very long period of time. The example of Fairweather is with us on the walls today, and the energy of the Annandale Imitation Realists is here today. The energy that you also find in the work of Olsen and Klippel, is represented through all of the paintings in this exhibition.

James Mollison speaking at the official opening of Arthur McIntyre’s solo exhibition Life, Sex, Death, Décor at Holdsworth Galleries on 1 July 1995.

For stamina alone, McIntyre is surely a legend of Australian art. There can be few of his peers who have adhered with such consistency of purpose to a single vision. His practice, largely in the collage medium he has found so fruitful for so long, is built around a corporal conception of the world. Like Leonardo, he measures humanity by its limbs. He also recalls that most in his reverence for the human form. Though McIntyre’s bodies are sometimes blighted to the point of cadaverousness – his interest in pathology is inveterate – they never advance into view without the grace mark of compassion. Moral completeness is almost everything to McIntyre, leaving enough room for a fastidious technique.

Bruce James, ‘Limbs like Leonardo’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August 1997, p.14

McIntyre was a figure who very much stood at the divide between late modernism and postmodernism. Bred on an appetite for cinematic montage meshed with an obsessive regard for figurative abstraction, McIntyre made work that consistently embraced the body and sexuality in cut-and-paste arrangements that curiously sidestepped the emerging high theory affectations of 1980s postmodernism… As singular as he was in his ambition and perspective, the ‘legend’ of Arthur McIntyre stems from his creative intuition for a ‘queered’ sense of mutability, indeed the ‘vicissitudes’ that give form to life, death and how we represent it.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham, “Survival, Decay and Excavation: Curating Arthur McIntyre”, Art Monthly Australia, no.211, July 2008