“I always wanted my paintings to have the feel of foreign films,” says Duncan Hannah, and his new series, produced during the pandemic, follows suit. Isolation gave the artist a chance to “build a momentum like never before and indulge myself in my filmic fantasies on small canvases,” the result being portraits of minor movie starlets—and some not-so-minor ones, including Jacqueline Bisset and Jean Seberg—of the 1950s and 1960s. Like his well-known series of English paperback covers, the works in Hannah’s “Imagined Journeys” follow in the representational tradition of his heroes Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. There’s a strong nostalgia factor at play. But look closely and you’ll see that the artist also took liberties—a stroke of a brush giving way to a unique feeling—personalizing his representations. —J.V.

Duncan Hannah: Imagined Journeys
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Modernism Inc. / San Francisco / Art
Modernism Inc. / San Francisco / Art
Duncan Hannah, “Ghost in Shepherd’s Market, 1931,” 2020. Photo courtesy of Modernism Inc.
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