Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons and JG/Contemporary - New York

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Lilly Wei

Duncan Hannah's atmospheric realism recalls that of Edward Hopper by way of 1930s and '40s illustrations, with a touch of Masterpiece Theatre. His well-executed, modest to moderately scaled oil paintings are suffused with boyish charm and nostalgia, a backward glance steeped in the thin, delicate light of memory, evoking a time when life seemed more spacious and leisurely, and different manners and mores prevailed. Hannah's remembrances of things past, however, are sometimes skewed by subtle dissonances and a sense of anxiety that disturb the apparent placidity of his picture-perfect world. Presented in two locations--Graham's uptown gallery and its Chelsea space--the exhibition was divided along subject lines. The uptown show featured paintings of ships or young men outdoors (all works 2000-02), while the downtown one consisted of female nudes enclosed in interiors or set off like jewels against rich, velvety grounds. Here, the works were more various in date.

Approximately half the paintings uptown depicted vessels of some sort. Presented on a smallish vertical canvas, the majestic Queen Mary (2001) recalls the vanished glamour of ocean voyages. Floating World is a cool, pale, luminous picture of an ocean liner escorted by two sturdy tugboats. Many of the other works show ships in distress, such as A Cautionary Tale (2001), which situates a freighter in a cove that is much too shallow for it, or Sea Change (2000), in which two boys on a boulder-strewn beach appear unaware of a nearby vessel steaming toward possible danger. Stranded (2002) depicts a galleon sitting high and dry on sand like a beached whale, useless, its glory days gone, while The House on the Cliff (2002) is an ominous nocturnal scene with crashing waves, a full moon and a speeding motorboat, inspired by the jacket of an early Hardy Boys mystery. Several of Hannah's paintings seem to be narratives from the entreguerres period, reminiscent of scenes from novels by such English writers as Evelyn Waugh or Ford Madox Ford. The Temple of the Four Winds (2002) casts two very similar young men in mackintoshes with their backs toward us, gazing across a lake and luxuriant lawn toward Vanbrugh's Palladian folly in the far, perhaps unattainable distance. Reading Outside (2002) is another pastoral, this time of a young man engrossed in his newspaper, stopped near a bared tree. Why is he standing there? What is he reading with such interest?

Hannah's almost three dozen, intimate-sized nudes were more straightforward. These portrayals in various mediums of seductive, partly clad young women often freeze them in the act of undressing, a held brassiere dangled, breasts uncovered, such as in 19 Gower Mews (1997). Another Hannah preference is to show them frontally, baring a neat triangle of pubic hair, like the demure young girl who lifts up her dress in The Red Curtain (1998-99), or the more sultry, worldly model in Regarding Mandy (2002), one of a series of "Regarding ..." works. Mandy is a tease of an image, as she stands in high heels, gartered, legs sheathed in sheer black stockings, her panties slipped down to her knees. Hannah's retro style, more naughty than nasty, both softens the pornographic attitudes and conveys a bemused titillation, as if Nancy Drew and chums, in the febrile imagination of Hannah's all-American English boys, had all very much grown up.