Deutscher and Hackett

TANNER 110039.jpg

Edwin Tanner

The public servant, 1953

oil on canvas

64.5 x 100.7 cm

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

Professional engineers, 1954, is one of Edwin Tanner’s most impactful paintings of satirical and autobiographical social realism. It canonised his early format of filiform figures operating in blank offices leached of life and colour. It was extensively exhibited, with the resulting critical commentary spurring the artist to publish a response defending his work to his engineering peers—providing rare insight into his early artistic motivations.
 
Edwin Tanner remains one of Australia’s most idiosyncratic artists. Self-taught in art, Tanner was a polymath whose unusual and diverse career progression and broad range of intellectual pursuits informed his paintings. The resultant works, although inflected with modernist techniques, stood well apart from the regional expressionism practised around the country during the second half of the twentieth century. Having emigrated from Wales in the early 1920s, the Tanner family worked as miners around Newcastle, while young Edwin showed early aptitude for mathematics and mechanical engineering. From 1935, Tanner steadily and tirelessly accumulated apprenticeships and degrees by correspondence in engineering, civil design, physics, logic, mathematics and philosophy. By 1954 he was living and working in Hobart, employed as Engineer-in-Charge at the Structural Design Department of the Hydro-Electric Commission of Tasmania. As such, he was a card-carrying member of the Association of Professional Engineers, whose vocation he felt qualified to lampoon in this early painting. 
 
In September of 1953, while studying evening classes of Fine Art at Hobart Technical College, Tanner saw the influential exhibition French Painting Today, as it toured regional capitals to Hobart. Similarly to John Brack in Melbourne, the germ of Tanner’s ‘sparse, elongated style’¹ can be traced back to a self-portrait Le peintre, 1949, by French enfant terrible Bernard Buffet.² Like Buffet, Tanner decided to flatly paint the realities of his own profession in Professional engineers (indeed, it was later, somewhat ironically, exhibited in an international exhibition extolling the virtues of manual labour). The large painting depicts two engineers hunched over a draughtsman’s table, marooned in a windowless, spartan room. Although there are flashes of colour in their clothes, their sharply delineated forms fuse with the geometric furniture of their laboratory, prefiguring the anonymous symbols of circuity the figures would become in Tanner’s later works. With a poetic sensibility for negative space and colour, Tanner’s work here is subtle and quietly humorous. The humour was lost on his fellow engineers. Similar to the media furore that had erupted over his painting of The public servant, exhibited at Victoria’s Contemporary Art Society in May 1954, the display of Professional engineers as a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales brought it to the attention of his scientific peers. To defend himself, Tanner penned the following:

110039 edwin tanner, the engineers.jpg

Edwin Tanner

The engineers, 1954

oil on linen

79.0 x 98.5 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

 

‘It is the atmosphere of the painting I find stifling, the characters seem etiolated and enveloped in a large vacant space with only the minimum of nourishment… these engineers seem to me good, honest souls, rather unimaginative, but faithfully pursuing their daily task [...] I felt it inappropriate that a painting of Professional Engineers should be dramatic; any drama in an engineering office is conducted on a subtle scale [...] The work is a unified thesis. Every stroke or item is a function of all the others…’³
 
For all of Tanner’s eccentricities, he produced an astounding body of work. Although during his lifetime he largely remained neglected by the press and the art establishment, his works were prized among artists and a small group of connoisseurs appreciative of the inventiveness of his unique artistic vision. Today Tanner’s place has been rightfully re-established and solidified through further acquisitions by the National Gallery of Victoria, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and most recently, a major retrospective exhibition held at TarraWarra Museum of Art, where Professional engineers was featured on the cover of their published catalogue.
 
1. ‘Even before I saw a Brack painting we were influenced by the brilliant young Victor [sic.] Buffet of Paris… Buffet had a marvellous painting in the large French exhibition’, Edwin Tanner, letter to Gwen Harwood, 11 December 1979, Gwen Harwood papers, UQFL45, Box 25, Folder 11, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane
2. Gleeson, J., ‘Pictures fall below standard’, Sun, Sydney, 30 October 1953, p.19
3. ‘Artist’s statement’ in The Professional Engineer, vol. II, nos. 6 and 7, June – July 1957, pp. 6 - 8
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH