EDWIN RUSSELL TANNER

Mr Ronald Greenaway, Melbourne
Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby's Melbourne, 22 August 1994, lot 80
Corporate collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Contemporary Art Society of Australia Annual Exhibition, Preston Motors, Melbourne, 10-21 May, 1955, no. 187
Exhibition of Paintings by Edwin Tanner, Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 7-24 April 1959, no. 31

This work has not been lined and appears to have original stretcher. Very minor frame rubbing top right hand corner from frame rebate. No visible defects. Some surface dirt consistent with age. UV inspection confirms no re-touching.
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Edwin Tanner introduced himself in the catalogue of a 1970 exhibition as 'Edwin Tanner B.A., Dip.Art., C.Eng., F.I.Struct.E (London), F.I.E., Consulting Engineer, Painter and Poet.'¹  This complex and seemingly contradictory set of skills and interests is what makes Tanner such an interesting painter. His work as an engineer, his experience as an aeroplane pilot, a cyclist and a marksman, his pleasure in music, his enthusiasm for and collecting of tribal art, his poetry, his studies in mathematics and philosophy each contribute to his art another visual language, another notation, another perspective.

Thus, for example, while his flattening of the picture plane comes from post-impressionist and modernist painters (possibly from Giorgio de Chirico's 'metaphysical' surrealism, probably from the constructivism of Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson), it derives equally from the engineer's photographs, diagrams and blueprints, and from the pilot's multiple-aerial viewpoints. The careful plotting of form is also attributable in equal measure to artistic taste and to technical training. Tanner certainly declared his admiration for the spare, subtle domestic geometries of Giorgio Morandi's still lifes² , yet the graphic language of engineers expresses the same essential dynamic, that of location and relation. The Sydney painter Godfrey Miller had a similar engineering/drafting background, and his works characteristically net their forms within an irregular lattice of parallel and converging lines. Tanner's placement is every bit as carefully determined, but without the linear-geometric scaffolding. The artist's wife Shirley recalled: 'composition was a matter of continuing experiment. Not for him the "golden mean." He deliberately broke the rules and made his own. Paintings stood for weeks, months and even years until the last vital brushstroke...was placed in such a way that everything fell into place and balanced perfectly.'³ 

The present work is one of a number from the mid-1950s in which the artist explored aspects of his new job as engineer in charge of the structural design department of the Hydro Electricity Commission, works such as Engineers (1954, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), Water Power Engineers (1954, private collection), Workshop (1954, private collection), Manless World (1955, private collection) and The Board of Directors (1955-56, private collection). These pictures present the work of the Organization Man, in which mechanical forms are subtly anthropomorphized and human figures severely disciplined by geometry, all within airless, weightless, equivocal spaces. Test Room is ambiguous in just this way. The red-headed green verticals standing on the 'horizon' could be Hydro robots, while the three-pin plugs on the 'wall' have slant-eyed faces. The circular form in the centre of the composition could be a turbine, an insulator or a desk-mounted pencil sharpener, while the angled mast with looped line at the right could be an aerial, a crane or a fishing rod.

Part non-objective construction, part cartoon, this work shows Tanner at his weird and witty best. Initially purchased and owned for many years by Contemporary Art Society colleague and fellow 'social surrealist' Ronald Greenaway, the work was included in Tanner's survey show at John Reed's Museum of Modern Art in 1959.

1.  Edwin Tanner, Powell Street Gallery, July 1970
2.  Tanner's friend, the poet Gwen Harwood, dedicated her poem Giorgio Morandi to him.
3.  Shirley Tanner, 'Office Interior' by Edwin Tanner, unpublished essay for the Staff Association of Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School, 1983.