DUANE HANSON: Artful Master of Super-Realism - exhibit `Duane Hanson: A Survey of His Work from the 30s to the 90s, Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN

The sculptor's "slice-of-life" figures and their ordinary activities are frozen forever in their poses and actions.

Duane Hanson took sculpture off its pedestal and removed the boundaries that separated art from life. His intention was to represent a cross-section of American society by focusing on the singularities of individuals. In addition to their lifelike exteriors, his works communicate the internal attitudes and experiences of Hanson's subjects. It is this combination of the physical and psychological that elicits a broad range of emotional responses from the spectator.

Born in 1925, Hanson first took up sculpture as a teenager, but it was not until 1967 that art became a full-time career for him, when he settled on the concept and process that would mark all his later works. Through the realism produced by direct body casting, he explored the emotions of otherwise "invisible" Americans. When seen in a museum context, these sculptures effect a kind of super-realism that forcibly focuses viewers' attention on the resignation and desolation the artist perceived in ordinary lives.

Hanson grew up in the rural Minnesota town of Parkers Prairie. As a teenager, he taught himself to carve and sculpt, demonstrating a natural inclination toward the human form. His early works were created from whatever materials were at hand, often logs or old broomsticks, and carved with his mother's butcher knife. "Blue Boy," done at the age of 13, was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough's 18th-century painting, which Hanson saw in reproduction in the only art history book in his school library. It wasn't until he went to college that he received his first formal art training. In 1946, he graduated from Macalester College as the school's first art major.

Although Hanson continued to sculpt during the 1950s, little of his work from this decade survives. Pieces such as "Female Bust" are more abstract than his early work, though they still are representative. This stylistic shift was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing art movement of the 1950s. In the end, however, Hanson resisted the pressure of the vanguard. As he explained his art of this period, "I would try to do abstract work, but I always put a bit of an arm or nose in it. I never could do just nonfigurative work."

From 1953 to 1960, Hanson lived in Munich and Bremerhaven, Germany, working as an art teacher for the U.S. Army Dependent School System. It was in Germany that he began to experiment with synthetic media, in particular polyester resin and fiberglass--materials that would become his signature media beginning in the late 1960s.

Hanson moved back to America in 1960. By mid decade, he was conceiving his sculptures in the spirit of contemporaneous social protest and political agitation movements. The works dealt with issues such as racial inequality and the danger of illegal about which the artist held strong convictions. Such confrontational sculptures as "Abortion" and "Gangland Victim" force the audience to face challenging issues without the psychic distancing inherent to television and newspaper reports. Hanson's works invade reality in an urgent and physical way: as three-dimensional forms, usually life-size, sharing viewers' space and incorporating real objects. At the time of their creation, these sculpture caused a media sensation. Because of their politically charged subject matter, several were banned from museum exhibitions and denounced by reactionary critics.

In the late 1960s. Hanson began to experiment with direct casting from a human form. Using synthetic resins, he made a mold from the body and used it to cast a three-dimensional sculpture. Each figure was cast in several sections before being joined together. Hanson then painted the surface in careful detail and added the necessary accessories and props. Although he would experiment with other methods and media, Hanson used direct casting for the duration of his career.

It usually is assumed that each Hanson figure is the likeness of a real person, but this is not the case. "I'm not duplicating life. I'm making a statement about human values," Hanson said. When searching for a model for "Cowboy," for example, he met with several cowboys and rodeo workers, but all lacked the machismo he was looking for. Instead, a local Florida carpenter served as the model for the cast. Similarly, Hanson sometimes would construct a single figure using molds of several people. He used the same body for "Queenie II" and the female in "Tourists II," but with different heads and different treatments of skin tone. The final works, in other words, do not represent actual people in actual environments, but realistic fictions.

In 1973, Hanson moved from New York City to Florida, where he focused on representing what he considered the familiar and ordinary Americans, such as tourists, shoppers, and sunbathers. Like the Pop artists of the 1960s, he was interested in depicting the commonplace in uncommon ways. Although his realism sometimes was unflattering or even brutal, his stated intention was to ennoble his subjects by turning them into art. Despite his apparent shift away from politically engaged themes, the emotionalism of these earlier works remained, depicting quiet suffering, melancholic introspection, or resignation of these people. Hanson's "slice-of-life" figures and their ordinary activities are frozen forever in their poses and actions. Perhaps the ultimate paradox of Hanson's realism is that his lifelike figures seem incapable of escaping their situations. In the end, the courage with which they seem to endure this fate expresses the dignity and nobility that Hanson found in the common American.

Hanson often spent as long as a year on a single figure, and the process of developing and executing a group of figures was even more labor-intensive and time-consuming. In the 1970s, he became interested in expanding the complex physical and emotional range of his sculptures by creating relationships between individuals. He first began to make figures in pairs, such as "Children Playing Game." Frequently, the casts were assembled by Hanson in a fictional setting. For instance, the married couple in "Tourists II" was based on life casts of two people who had never actually met.

Hanson then began producing larger, tableau-type environments with three figures and often elaborate surroundings. "Lunch Break (Three Workers with Scaffold)" features a group of construction workers at rest, placed among scaffolding and tools. Although united by their trade, their physical exhaustion, and a pervasive melancholy, they remain self-contained, individualized conceptions.

By the late 1980s, Hanson was using bronze to produce more durable sculptures, such as "Man on a Lawn Mower," which could be placed outdoors, in the very context implied by the figure's characterization. Bronze also projects a sense of permanence, which perhaps appealed to Hanson as he battled cancer toward the end of his life. Whatever the medium, Duane Hanson's sculptures ennoble the commonplace, the ephemeral. His art remains a testament to the unrecognized American culture he embraced and celebrated until his death in 1996.

An exhibition, "Duane Hanson: A Survey of His Work from the 30s to the 90s," is on view at the Memphis (Tenn.) Brooks Museum of Art through June 13.

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