Edwin Tanner

(1920-1980)

The polar ship 1954

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Monica O'Sullivan (1976)
Eastgate Gallery, Melbourne
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1994

EXHIBITED
Museum of Modern Art and Design, Melbourne (details unknown)
Tanner, Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, 23 June – 10 July 1970, cat. no. 7
Edwin Tanner retrospective 1976, Age Gallery, Melbourne, 18-29 October 1976, cat. no. 38

LITERATURE
Patrick McCaughey, et al, Edwin Tanner retrospective 1976, Age Gallery, Melbourne, 1976, npp.


Edwin Tanner spread his interests wide. An engineer (he had been involved in the Myer Music Bowl), and an artist (idiosyncratic, but respected by his peers), he was emphatic about his choice of a dual career. Whilst dedicated to both, if today he is better known for his art, this is probably due not just to the wider imaginative scope afforded by art, but to the sheer concentration and alert inventiveness which infused his path as an artist. He did everything with dedication, for he was also a competitive cyclist, a keen aviator and a crack shot – the first two often featuring in his art. On the cultural side, we find music, literature and philosophy - all wryly reflected in many of the titles of his paintings. As he put it: "Painting is approached with either Western philosophy, music and poetry (including my own) in mind or eye or ear."

His was a classic migrant's story. Arriving as a child at Port Kembla (his father was a miner from South Wales) his mathematical talent was spotted and his day's work at BHP was followed by evenings studying by correspondence for his degree in engineering. In the early 1950s he moved to Hobart, working for the Hydro-Electric Commission and in 1957 moved to Melbourne where, in 1960, he set up in private practice as a consulting engineer.

Here he had already come to public prominence when, in 1954, Daryl Lindsay purchased The civil servant for the National Gallery of Victoria. A cool and precise depiction of a grey (and soulless) office interior, it caused a stir: there was no one working at the desk! Hackles rose, letters were sent to the papers – but the storm in the teacup soon subsided. Interestingly Tanner subtly changed his tune: in subsequent works in the series the offices were indeed inhabited – but by emaciated clerks whose grey suits blended inexorably into their grey surrounds. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

This series was followed by depictions of a world he knew from his other professional life: shipyards and factories. If the factories were filled with exotic and incomprehensible machinery, the ships took on a quirky life of their own. With their hulls looking like inverted versions of the Eiffel Tower, balanced precariously on slipways or dry docks, or, as here, on rather than in the water, you don't need to be an engineer to know these vessels could only ever sail across a purely imaginary sea where the physical laws of displacement and gravity had been suspended.

He had early shown a taste for animism and this continued for much of his life. If his humans were often reduced to mechanical cyphers, his ships stood like greyhounds eager for the chase - just as, in his industrial paintings, his machines and generators hummed with their own activity, a point in which he has often been compared by critics with Paul Klee. His polar ship bustles with seemingly self-generated busyness – sprouting an array of derricks, masts and cranes all hard at work attending to their important tasks. To us landlubbers it all looks most impressive, but I'd imagine seasoned mariners would scratch their heads – and start to laugh.

Charles Nodrum