REMEMBERING: Duncan Hannah, Artist and ’70s Chronicler, Dies at 69 / VIDEO: Artist Duncan Hannah recalls New York in the 70s in new book

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Duncan Hannah, Artist and ’70s Chronicler, Dies at 69

 

He immersed himself in the wild New York scene of Warhol and CBGB, then emerged in the ’80s as a respected painter.

 

Neil Genzlinger

By Neil Genzlinger

Published June 15, 2022

Updated June 16, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/arts/duncan-hannah-dead.html

 

Duncan Hannah, who immersed himself in the boisterous art-and-club scene of 1970s New York — vividly documenting it in a 2018 book drawn from diaries he kept — and then in the 1980s became a well-regarded artist himself, died on Saturday at his home in Cornwall, Conn. He was 69.

 

His wife, Megan Wilson, said the cause was a heart attack.

 

As an artist, Mr. Hannah was known for scenes that evoked old films and old Europe and that owed a debt to Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer, whom he admired. But they also had a vaguely eerie quality. Michael Kimmelman, reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Hannah’s work at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York for The New York Times in 1988, was struck by a painting called “News of the World.”

 

“Against a beautiful mauve-pink-gray sky, a boy carries a newspaper through a nearly empty town,” Mr. Kimmelman wrote. “The place is at once ordinary and totally unreal. This is the heart of Mr. Hannah’s terrain — a curious, half-dream, half-nightmare landscape just on the edge of no place.”

 

 Barry Blinderman was director of the Semaphore and Semaphore East galleries in Manhattan at the time and was among the first to exhibit Mr. Hannah.

 

“When I exhibited his paintings throughout the 1980s,” he said by email, “a wide audience responded to their dreamy teleportation to a time of innocence, their Cézannesque brushstrokes, their sense of mystery.”

 

Many artists were exploring abstraction at the time, and some critics, Mr. Hannah admitted, didn’t seem to get what he was doing.

 

“They just assumed I was being ironic and this was some kind of critique of art history, which it wasn’t,” he told “CBS This Morning” in 2018. “It was more of a love letter to art history.”

 

Mr. Blinderman watched as Mr. Hannah’s style gradually attracted a following.

 

“It took a while before the cognoscenti acknowledged the work’s criticality — its deadpan delivery of displacement through the lens of film, its ‘learned irony,’ as termed by Times critic John Russell,” he said, referring to a 1983 review in The Times. “Duncan now stands at his easel beside Balthus, Hopper, Bonnard and Sickert.”

 

Before he broke through as an artist, Mr. Hannah was — as he himself would surely have acknowledged — the very definition of a “scene-maker,” logging time at CBGB and other hot clubs and hanging with the Warhol crowd.

 

“I’ve always been interested in scenes,” he told The Times in 2016, when his artworks were being exhibited at New Release, a gallery in Chinatown. “Even scenes that aren’t mine, like Swinging London, the Beat scene or Paris in the ’20s. So when I got to New York, I wanted to find the scene or make the scene. Whatever was going on, I wanted to find the center of it. And I still do, I suppose.”

 

He was a distinctive figure in those years, sometimes working a dapper, attention-getting look that one writer described as “a Bogart-style trench coat and tightly knotted tie amid a sea of torn T-shirts and safety-pinned leather jackets.”

 

He seemed to be everywhere, yet he found time to keep diaries, from which he drew to create one of the livelier and more explicit portraits of that time and place, “20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies” (2018). The book is anecdote-rich and full of famous names: Mr. Hannah told of finding himself in a limousine with Warhol, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie; of visiting a friend’s apartment, finding the singer Nico there and making her a cocktail; of repelling an unwanted proposition from Allen Ginsberg. It’s also full of 1970s excesses.

 

Anna Sui, the acclaimed fashion designer, was, like Mr. Hannah, a native of the Midwest who navigated her way to New York. For a time she lived on the same Manhattan block as Mr. Hannah, frequently attending parties at his place.

 

“We escaped middle-class suburbia in the Midwest for the ’70s New York underground and lived out our fantasies of rock stars and movie heroes,” Ms. Sui said by email. “Duncan was the prettiest, most stylish and cool guy around during the CBGB’s days.”

 

In the preface to his book, Mr. Hannah reflected on his immersion in the wild ’70s scene.

 

“Our quest for authenticity and experience led us in colorful directions,” he wrote. “We had faith in the journey, even if we were unsure of the destination.”

 

Duncan Rathbun Hannah was born on Aug. 21, 1952, in Minneapolis. His father, James, was a lawyer, and his mother, Rosemary (Rathbun) Hannah, was an interior decorator. He had already begun keeping a journal when he graduated from high school in Minneapolis, and the entries reveal a young man eager to broaden his horizons.

 

“I’ve been accepted to Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, so it’s the East Coast for me next fall,” he wrote. “I’ll put myself in odd situations. I won’t avoid challenges, I will uncover my true grit. I’ll exhaust my resources and keep pushing through.”

 

He arrived in New York in 1971 and after two years at Bard transferred to the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, graduating in 1975.

 

His activities in the 1970s included appearing in two underground films directed by Amos Poe, both of which also starred Debbie Harry of Blondie: “Unmade Beds” (1976) and “The Foreigner” (1978). He made a handful of other film appearances, but in the “CBS This Morning” interview years later, he acknowledged that his strengths were in other areas.

 

“I realized appreciating good acting and executing good acting are two very different things,” he said.

 

If he spent the 1970s sampling almost everything the punk scene had to offer, he left much of that behind when the decade ended and he became more serious about his art.

 

“I’ve been bathing in the light of sobriety for several months now,” he wrote at the start of an unpublished follow-up to “20th Century Boy” that was drawn from his journal entries from the 1980s. “Off the booze, off the drugs. Taking stock of my life.”

 

“It’s not as though I’m without my vices,” he added. “I drink a pot of coffee a day, and smoke 20-30 Camel filters. There is of course sex, although I’m not at all sure that constitutes a vice.”

 

His inclusion in the Times Square Show, a seminal group exhibition in 1980 that also included Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, put his art career in motion. In a 2016 interview with The Times, he recalled the surprise of a friend who in the early 1980s had come to his first solo show and seen his throwback works for the first time.

 

“‘Is this what you do? These are like real paintings,’” he recalled the friend saying. “His message was clear: ‘I thought you were cool!’ Well, I love painting. To me, Whistler is cool. Vuillard is really cool.”

 

In addition to his wife, Mr. Hannah is survived by a sister, Holly Lewis.

 

Mr. Hannah, who had homes in Cornwall and Brooklyn, reconnected with Ms. Sui years after their shared ’70s experiences. She said he would attend her fashion shows and enjoyed inviting friends to lunch at the Century Association, the Manhattan arts and dining club.

 

“Duncan had come full circle,” she said, “creating his wonderful life, sober and so proud of the fact that he had always supported himself as a working artist.”

 

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic. More about Neil Genzlinger

Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies

by Duncan Hannah (Author)

 

A rollicking account of a celebrated artist's coming of age, full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, fantastically good music, and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum, and featuring cameos from David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and many more.

 

"A phantasmagoria of alcohol, sex, art, conversation, glam rock, and New Wave cinema. Hannah's writing combines self-aware humor with an intoxicating punk energy." --The New Yorker

Painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade, Twentieth-Century Boy is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place.

 

The Thin White Dunc: A Jaded Dandy in 1970s New York

July 25, 2018   •   By Anthony Mostrom

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-thin-white-dunc-a-jaded-dandy-in-1970s-new-york/

 

Twentieth-Century Boy

DUNCAN HANNAH

 

YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T HEARD of Duncan Hannah, a New York–based painter and illustrator, though there’s a somewhat famous, mid-’70s photo of him lounging in a rattan chair next to a bathing-suit-clad Debbie Harry. The image comes from an obscure 1976 art film called Unmade Beds, an amateurish, charming New York time capsule directed by Amos Poe (neither Hannah nor Harry could act).

 

Hannah will now be known as a diarist. As he notes in his new book Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies: “This is not a memoir. These are journals, begun in 1970 at the age of seventeen, written as it happened, filled with youthful indiscretions.”

 

Arriving in New York City from Minnesota, thin and wispy young Duncan is already well read and culturally hip — and not lockstep hip either, but rather a precocious contrarian. In art, he likes comic books, illustrators, and, most of all, David Hockney. To his credit, he tells his knee-jerk-avant art teachers at Bard College that he likes the Pre-Raphaelites. (“They shook their heads…” Well, of course they did. Of course they did.) He paints portraits of his offbeat literary heroes (e.g., Wyndham Lewis, Colin Wilson), which itself is kind of odd, and exhibits them in a group show, “in spite of not fitting in with the show’s agenda.”

 

Most of this book recounts our young rake meeting almost everyone important in his two worlds of art and music: Hockney, Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, Larry Rivers, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry. A precocious dialectician, he can spar with the best — and worst — of them:

Danny shouts, “Louis, Louis, come join us!” looking at the entrance to the back room. I crane my neck to see who he is talking to. Gulp. Standing there in an alcoholic stupor, looking into my eyes, is the avatar of decadence and perversion, the legendary Lou Reed!

 

Creepy Reed lopes over to their table and whispers a truly stomach-turning proposition to our young diarist, which I won’t describe here. Appalled, Hannah becomes an ex-fan: “My hero worship is immediately over. Ick. […] He downs the rest of his tequila and leaves me alone in the booth to ponder my missed scatological opportunity.” It’s telling that Hannah, who lets the reader know that he has excised much from these journals, decided to leave this story in. Later on, he spots Reed at Max’s Kansas City, looking “like a skinny chimpanzee.”

 

Our narrator’s musings reach a peak of quotability whenever he’s witnessing the sorry truth about his heroes:

Fran Lebowitz sits with us and complains about her latest trick. [New York] Dolls drummer Jerry Nolan comes in with a gaudy chick in leopard skin, zippers, and frosted hair. Real skanky. Fran slips off …

 

Hannah also displays a shrewd ear for good music versus trash:

Bryan Ferry never disappoints […] Hawkwind […] weren’t to my taste. Queen […] I don’t like. […] Television is sounding better and better. Lenny Kaye called them “the golden apple at the top of the tree.”

 

[D]rove to Edgar Winter’s house on Sands Point, Long Island. This is Fitzgerald country, the fictional East Egg […] Gatsby! Yet inside this mansion was a rock band, dressed in their glitter sneakers and spandex, playing pinball machines and watching crap TV. Oblivious […] Pearls before swine, I thought to myself. We listened to a rough mix of their new album, which sounded lame […] Just loud, boring product for dullard youths. Rock ‘n roll can be incredibly stupid.

 

 

At what must have been the greatest New York rock-star party that ever happened, at the Academy of Music in June 1974, he sidles up to both Bryan Ferry, who’s distant and distracted, and David Bowie, who’s friendly, engaging, and witty:

He graced me with a glance, and I asked him if he was collecting material for a new song at this very minute. He sneered his canines at me and said, “Yah, why, do you wanna be in my song?”

 

I sneered back, “Yah, what about it?” We kept up our grimaces like a couple of thugs, necks outstretched, until he broke out laughing.

 

Meanwhile, in the art scene, minimalism is in full swing, but Duncan is (appropriately) unmoved. His stubborn conservatism, though, seems possibly to have cost him a more high-profile art career in such a ripe time and place. Hockney himself pays a visit and critiques his work (“Your drawing is a bit heavy-handed in the American fashion”), but progress remains slow, and he resists painting “something conceptual […] [s]omething that had quotes around it.” Regardless, Hannah’s days in New York were clearly tilted more in favor of “the life” (sex, drugs, and parties).

 

You might assume that our young-and-waify hero proceeded to screw his way willy-nilly through the gender-bending, glammy ’70s, this being the comparatively carefree, pre-AIDS era. But though his wolf-baiting good looks and friendliness are a constant magnet to a parade of lecherous males, he remains, steadfastly, straight as a razor.

 

The budding sociologist in Hannah (all of 22 here) is sharp-eyed when recalling a party at “the old Factory”:

This is the place where trigger-happy Valerie Solanas shot Andy. Creepy. They used to shoot laser beams from up here across the park into Max’s. I feel the party’s force fields, currents of strength, currents of weakness. “The love that dare not speak its name” just won’t shut up these days. Gayness has lost its underground status in NYC and is busy becoming the dominant sensibility. Lots of affectation. Sad when things turn to parody.

 

A short detour through London in August 1972 (“We sit at the dark basement bar and eyeball a couple of likely-looking English lasses, in their ‘frock coats and bipperty-bopperty hats’”) contains yet another best-possible-time-and-place music pilgrimage I can’t help but envy:

Robert Wyatt’s new group, Matching Mole, play. I love them. Then it’s Roy Wood’s Wizzard, who look ridiculous but sound great.

 

 

At intermission, we drank vodka […] and wound up talking to a forward young girl named Mary. […] Mary said she liked effeminate boys and I nudged her over to the doorway […] and kissed her and felt up her tits.

 

Bingo, glam-rock-era success! (This episode aside, the book is disappointingly scant on pornographic details, despite the number of conquests it chronicles.) Our thin white duke’s 20th birthday is summarily ruined, however, when his androgynous looks and excessive drinking in a London gay bar lead to what he calls a “near-rape experience,” the one truly frightening episode in the book.

 

While the party girls and the art-student girls keep on “flying low” for our handsome young buck, the picaresque life is starting to wear him down:

I smell like booze all the time now, but it’s expensive booze for a change. Perpetual hangover. […] I’m living faster than I can write. Not that I actually have something to write about. There’s no time to do it.

 

Everything turns sour. “The next chapter of this blackout finds me alone…” Hannah realizes he’s an alcoholic. A “real” girlfriend in his life (a rarity) turns out to be nuts:

Terry was hearing voices in her head, and she stabbed me in the chest with a small penknife she keeps in her bag. The little blade bounced off a bone. Ouch! This because the voices were teasing her about my so-called “harem.” “Terry, there is no harem!” But the voices insisted.

 

There is much tottering down smelly New York alleyways in platform shoes during many a besotted dawn. It’s a pungent, Scorsese’d-out New York that wafts up from these pages: “It’s hard to unravel people’s origins in New York. They act cagey. Suspicious”; neurosis in the air “mistaken for energy […] the new pissiness”; “[p]eople fall apart all the time.”

 

As a final flourish, our now jaded dandy is disappointed when he visits grumpy Ned Rorem, who doesn’t come on to him at all but is actually a rather unfriendly old fuck. But Dunc is unfazed. To quote from an old blues song: “His disposition takes him through this world.”

 

Twentieth-Century Boy is a breezy, demotically precise portrait of Bowie-and-Warhol New York, splayed like a passed-out wino on every page. Hannah, who has no regrets and still looks young, now lives in New York and Connecticut.