Duncan Hannah: Flesh and Fantasy

They say the past is never really past, that the past is always present. But what do they say about the present state of past affairs, when presentism—the act of judging the past by the morals of the present—has in today’s climate morphed from being a mistake to a must?

You can’t but help thinking about this while perusing the paintings of the late Duncan Hannah, (1952-2022) whose fascinated and even fetishistic gaze into peepholes of the Continental midcentury past have led some people new to his work as some kind of nostalgia.

But these superficial criticisms fundamentally misunderstand Hannah (who, for the record, loathed the word nostalgia). They miss the forest for the tease.

The deeper story is that Hannah, whose star as a painter first rose after he spent (the 1970s) hanging around New York’s Factory and punk scenes, didn’t paint to express himself as an artist, he painted to express himself as a person. Having studied at Bard and Parsons (where he graduated in ‘75), the handsome Minneapolis native excelled at created a persona during the 1970s, styled himself as a 1940s-style gentleman-tough and acted in underground movies with Debbie Harry and many others.

Then, in the 1980s, his paintings started to be noticed. He was included in the famous 1980 Times Square Show alongside Basquiat and Haring. But his approach was more subtle than many other up-and-coming artists. He wasn’t ironic. He didn’t have a catchy graphic style. In painting, Hannah had found a mirror in which he could sincerely sense himself. That didn’t mean selfies. That meant ritualistically finding, recreating and reiterating visual tropes of the past that reinforced an inner world that he loved.

These glimpses were not—and this is crucial— from his own past. Hannah’s sensibility is a far more filtered and formulated act, often focusing on scenes culled from European cinema from the 30s to the 60s (and more often than not featuring European actresses in candid moments from same). Jane Birkin, Jean Seberg, Julie Christie, Monica Vitti—and a dozen less-known starlets on the cover of Euro cinema journals. Hannah’s casual snapshots, executed with an faux-amateur gloss, weren’t just paintings, though. They were articulations of his own carefully edited taste and perspective, in turn mirroring back the persona (with his faux-amateur gloss) he cultivated. Persona-fication, if you will.

He was so fascinated by this specific sensibility that he would even surprise those close to him by painting the same scenes over and over—such as his beloved icon, the Citroën DS, the famously photogenic postwar French sedan with the low-slung back.

When Hannah was alive, he was sometimes asked about his content by people who were puzzled why he didn’t act like a more normal artist. What they meant was why didn’t he didn’t seem to critique the past or open up to things like changing his style or outlook from year to year, discovering new faces (90s supermodels!), a new world (sci-fil!) or a new medium (Video!) or just changing in way at all.

Hannah let such suggestions roll off his back; they didn’t interest him. That was the point; he knew what interested him, and knowing and cultivating what interests you is a major and undervalued part of what makes you an artist. And in the last decade, young art fans have started to appreciate his long game. Hannah’s work is now being taken more seriously, and what to some might have seemed repetitive now looks like dedication to a single-minded vision as rigorously reinforced as Donald Judd or Andy Warhol or Marilyn Minter. Flexibility may beguile the critics with every new show these days, but in the long run, fixity stands for something. So if Duncan Hannah chose a hill to die on, it was quite a beautiful hill.

David Colman