Duncan Hannah: Baby Driver

One of the least examined aspects of the endlessly-dissected comeback of the figure in painting is how rarely the figures are, well, simply that. Nothing more. In other words, in case that was too abstract: in so much recent painting, figures are almost always clothed. This puts more emphasis on the persona than the physique, making the figure more of a symbolic entity than a body — a thing that activates a room, a landscape, an identity, an idea. Dressed for battle or gala from top to toe, the figure in the painting somehow becomes partly its co-author, its writer/director, its agent of activation.

It's an interesting contrast to the social-media world, where the almost-naked figure rules — often enough, through the backward-facing lens of the subject’s own iPhone, making her both subject and object. 

Which makes both of these a doubly interesting contrast to the late works of the New York painter Duncan Hannah, who died in 2022. In his last works, the naked (or nearly so) female body manages to take on dimensions that are kitchily and erotically familiar while being contemporarily and precariously unfamiliar. In a wide variety of poses ranging from kittenish and coy to brash, blasé and blunt, the women in this universe come beautifully but uneasily to life walking a tightrope between subject and object. 

Hannah occupies a unique place in contemporary art history. Both an unrepentant throwback to the concept of an artist painting a world that fascinates them, and a forerunner of today’s post-irony sensibility that seeks to explore unfiltered aspects of self, he has been famously impossible to pigeonhole. Refusing to “move on” from his visions of 50s and 60s-era women when critics and friends badgered him to, Hannah made “stuck” not just into an act of particularity or fetishism but of virtuosity.

That means his single-minded vision was full of nuance; he wasn’t fixated on Hollywood’s version of Eisenhower glamour, the buxom blondes with nipped-in waists — far 

more likely to zero his gaze on idiosyncratic European personalities like Julie Christie, Jean Seberg, Monica Vitti or Jane Birkin. His works on view this month at The Journal Gallery make it clear. Often inspired directly or indirectly from the quickie amateur-photography aesthetic of off-brand, obscure nude magazines from the early 1960s — like “Playmen,” “The Naturist” or “Soviet Life” —  the paintings give off a haphazard candor and composition that suggest a photo set up in seconds, not hours.

His late drawings, done in colored pencil on paper, sharpen this edge, suggesting an obsessive mind depicting and creating at the same time. You can see Hannah’s perfecting here, sketching there, relenting there. You get the sense with these that he wasn’t finished, and that perhaps he didn’t want to be.

You get another kind of sense of how his artist’s mind worked, oddly enough, through his fixation on the European automobiles of the early 1960s. This was true nowhere more than with the famous Citroen DS, whose trademark covered rear wheel wells gave it a sexy, slouchy hip-hugging backside that seemed to project its nose forward in space even when it was parked.  The DS is a kind of master key to the Hannah mystique, but he was also enamored with the stylish movie-star fire of candy-colored 1960s sports cars by Jaguar, Volvo, Lancia and more, sometimes spiffed up with a charismatic masculine signifier behind the wheel, like the dashing writer-explorer Peter Fleming (brother of Ian), or the famous racing driver Stirling Moss behind the wheel of a rocket-typal Vanwall prototype.

Of course, art today loves to throw a bucket of cold water at the audience, to challenge and dare them to change how they think, see, care. But right to the end, Hannah’s work was a wonderful reminder that offering a warm bath — of images, sensations, ideas — can do just as much good. Maybe more.  

David Coleman