Duncan Hannah 1952-2022
I first met Duncan Hannah at one of the Century Association lunches for fabs of the novels of Anthony Powell organized by Bill Warren in the 2000s. Hannah was introduced to me, by Bill Warren or Bill’s wife Arete, as a painter knowledgeable about Powell’s era and a fan of Powell’s works. I never knew him really well, but we had several conversations at these events and I got on the invitation list for his art shows, of which I attended a few, one of them, memorably, in the company of Jonathan Kooperstein. When I first talked to Duncan , we spoke of Henry Lamb and Rodrigo Moynihan, two painters for whom Powell sat in very different phases of his life. To hear of his death in mid-June 2022 was a shock, because he was somebody who was not yet old and look much younger than he was. Indeed, when his diaries (officially “Notebooks”) were published under the title Twentieth Century Boy in 2018, I could’ve see the title as not just retrospective but, the century notwithstanding, current.