Duncan Hannah (1952–2022) – Artforum International
Painter, collagist, and underground movie star Duncan Hannah, whose profession took him from the sticky ground of CBGB’s to the partitions of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, died of a coronary heart assault at his dwelling in West Cornwall, Connecticut, on June 11 on the age of seventy whereas watching a French movie. The information was confirmed by filmmaker Amos Poe, a longtime buddy. Hannah—whose piquant chronicle of the Downtown New York scene of the Nineteen Seventies, fathomed from the pages of his Pernod-soaked journals of the period, was enthusiastically obtained by audiences and critics alike—was identified for his figurative work evoking the Nineteen Thirties and ’40s, and for his beautiful beauty and style. Described by Glenn O’Brien within the pages of a 1984 difficulty of Artforum as “the Henry Mancini of the New Wave, or the power-pop Balthus,” Hannah continued to the tip of his life to confound critics who couldn’t determine whether or not he was, as O’Brien presciently put it, “retro- or post-something.”
Born in Minneapolis in 1952, Hannah was raised in a conservative family which he yearned to flee. Initially drawn to Summary Expressionism, he attended Bard Faculty in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, within the early Nineteen Seventies, earlier than shifting to New York Metropolis in 1973, the place he completed his diploma on the Parsons Faculty of Design in 1975. By then, he was already rubbing shoulders with the likes of Patti Smith, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Richard Hell, and Lou Reed, the final of whom as soon as provided to let Hannah, who on the time resembled shaggy-haired teen heartthrob David Cassidy, shit in his mouth (the younger painter politely declined). Throughout this time, he dabbled in movie work, notably showing alongside Debbie Harry in Poe’s 1976 Unmade Beds and the director’s 1978 The Foreigner. Hannah spent a lot of the Nineteen Seventies both blind drunk or searingly hungover, as he revealed in his 2018 memoir Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies, during which he detailed what Howard Hampton, writing in Bookforum, described as “riveting cautionary tales, demonstrating the need of uncooked experimentation as a supply of discovery and creativity, uneasily coupled with the steeply diminishing returns of shedding management as a lifestyle—or artwork.” Regardless of the ebook’s many vastly entertaining anecdotes—of a tired-looking Bowie and a washed-up Marc Bolan surreptitiously testing the New York membership scene; of being provided a blow job by Nancy Spungen within the elevator of the Chelsea Lodge; of getting loaded with Salvador Dalí—“a number of it was sort of painful,” Hannah informed M. H. Miller for The Paris Review. “It was cliquey. It’s not as if all people appreciated one another. There have been a number of unhealthy vibes. An evening at CBGB’s—not all of the bands have been good, and never all of the folks have been good, and also you get up with a horrible hangover and couldn’t actually bear in mind what occurred. It was simply sort of chaos in a means.”
In 1980, Hannah obtained sober and started to focus in earnest on his artwork, which by this time was figurative, usually rendered in oil on canvas and recalling in its stark, elegant model the work of Edward Hopper or Winslow Homer. His most well-liked topics have been sleepy-eyed European movie starlets and idealized vignettes of horny locales such because the streets of Paris, the race course of the Monaco Grand Prix, or the snowcapped Alps. Regardless of how idyllic the scene, popular culture was by no means far-off: A later collection comprised trustworthy renditions of classic ebook jackets. Although these works might sound in distinction to the seedy confines of CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas Metropolis, the place he minimize his tooth, Hannah discovered the glamour in all of it, whether or not high-toned or tawdry.
Hannah loved greater than seventy solo exhibits over a profession spanning 5 a long time, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011. His work is held within the collections of the Chicago Artwork Institute, the Minneapolis Artwork Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York, amongst different establishments.
“Generally I used to be shocked at how little I’ve modified,” Hannah informed Miller in 2018. “Different instances, I’d shake my head and assume, God, what an asshole. However I used to be shocked how nicely all of it labored out, in a sort of shambling means. You’ll be able to have a plan, however then your plan doesn’t work, after which one thing else occurs. However simply sort of inadvertently, the plan labored.”
