Painted 'Iconography of Harvard'

Duncan Hannah has made his living by filtering images of picturesque and sometimes solitary places through his feelings and memories. These often nostalgic paintings are now coming to Harvard—which holds a special place in his heart—via the Pierre Menard Gallery. Featuring two paintings of the Weld Boathouse, the exhibition could be viewed as Hannah’s own childhood travel journal, a series of images from his past.

“I was always attracted by the glamour and sophistication of the East Coast,” Hannah says. Though a Midwest native, Hannah traveled to the East Coast several times in his youth and often made visits to Harvard. His father, James B. Hannah, to whom the exhibit is dedicated, graduated from the College in 1942.

At the age of four, Hannah realized what he wanted to do with his life, following this dream to Bard College to study painting. The faculty members there were color-field painters, specializing in the abstract, so Hann ah transferred to the Parsons New School of Design two years later. “I wanted the challenge of verisimilitude,” Hannah says. “There is something in me that wanted to make narrative paintings, which of course abstract does not offer.”

Hannah cites the narratives of novelist Graham Greene as particular sources of inspiration for his paintings.

“[Greene] creates an emotional and psychological terrain that is recognizable no matter where his books are set,” Hannah says. “I set out to do something similar, to create a world that can encompass many variables, but is still one hermetically sealed world.”

Many of Hannah’s pieces carry an air of nostalgia and a sense of times long past. “Kickball,” for example, portrays the longing for childhood as three boys in old-fashioned attire kick around a ball. “Duncan Hannah’s work is a curious mixture of subtle and strong emotion and superficial triviality,” says John Wronoski, the owner of the Pierre Menard Gallery. “His paintings are a kind of iconography to reflect his emotions and important landmarks in his life.”

The two paintings of Weld Boathouse, which Hannah first saw at his father’s 25th reunion in 1967, are on display alongside his other work.

“I think Harvard was the most enjoyable thing [my father] ever did,” Hannah says. “When I would be at Harvard, I would be aware that this is the place. This place is very special...When I was painting the Harvard boathouse this summer, which I did from contemporary photographs, they were distilled by my memories and feelings at Harvard.”

“Iconography of Harvard is an aspect of his own childhood—a part of his emotional life,” Wronoski says. “Harvard is one of those lampposts in his memory that illuminates a large swath of his experience...It’s like an ongoing travel log. He is reporting not from places, necessarily, but from inside of him.”

While Hannah has a personal emotional connection to all of his work, he says that no one experience has more importance than another. When he sees one of his shows at a new gallery for the first time, he says, he is pleased with the overall aura of the exhibit. Though his pictures have differing subjects, they all possess a similar sense of personal reminiscence.

“I am always struck by how consistent it feels, like I knew what I wanted to do. But it never feels like that when I am painting a work, because life is so chaotic, and life has its ups and downs, and life has its distractions,” Hannah says. “When I go to a show I am assured that it looks like a world that reflects me, and I feel good about that.”