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. That was a boyishness about

Duncan, an enthusiasm and an empathetic openness and joy which most adults lose in the hustle bustle of life. Its retention was unquestionably key to his creative instinct. His paintings might be called nostalgic. They capture scenes and faces from the early 20th century, but might be called the Art Deco era, the era of early Hollywood, high modernism, and the popularization of bohemian an alternative lifestyles. But to call them nostalgic would be to miss the very distinct and very personal sense of longing in the paintings. The viewer is very aware that the painter is not at one with the vistas he limns. This discrepancy does not, to me, bring sadness, but a wistful affection. What could have been gimmicky became an aesthetically achieved visual language, one that will live on in museums and galleries and the record of the age.
There are three aspects of Hannah’s work that I think particularly relevant to the work and world of Anthony Powell, which is the interest he and I shared. First is the theme of voyeurism.

Hannah  did a whole series of painting entitled “Regarding …” followed by various female names. Clearly Hannah’s intent was for these paintings to be other than merely manifestations of “the male gaze” and in fact be both registering these issues on Women’s  subjectivities and investigating  their make observers who themselves might be searching for their own identity. This reminds us of Powell’s novels, where both Jenkins and Widmerpool are voyeurs. That Widmerpool is a sadistic voyeur and Jenkins a merely contemplative one makes all the difference, and Hannah’s paintings of women similarly strive for a non-toxic masculinity (that nonetheless appreciated the female form). 
Secondly, the era described in Hannah’s diaries, that of the Bohemian 1970s, is very much wherever Powell’s sequence ends. One can see Hannah  as an American, and heterosexual, Barnabas Henderson, but I think more of the character Jason Price in Powell’s 1983 novel O, How The Wheel Becomes It! This character was nostalgic for the 1920s, and error that he had never remotely experienced. But whereas Jason Price gets the era wrong because he only knows it from books and images, I think Hannah was very different; he had a real intuition and apprehension of the era, and was not simply a hipster, retro-nostalgist. Hannah  was at one end of the generational spectrum, and Powell another, but they were both contemporaries. One of the things Powell’s novel sequence and long life teaches us is that contemporaneity us something that could be stretched very long, across the span of time.
Finally, Hannah’s  diaries are a superb example of life writing, and if they are more like James Lees-Milne’s diaries than Powell’s Journals in terms of being about a young man still in the throes of finding his life’s work, they have a Powellian curiosity about people and their oddities an an omnivorous appreciation of music, art, film, and literature. For those who like audiobooks, I would recommend downloading the Audible audiobook of Twentieth Century Boy, because it is read by Duncan himself, and is a way of hearing the author’s voice now that we know longer have it.
Duncan Hannah was a true gentleman who made it a point to be kind to even those, like me, who were only incidental contacts of his. He will emerge as an important painter of his day, but for me he was somebody who made New York literary and cultural life just a bit more bearable