Invented Magazines

A staple-bound volume of Duncan Hannah's final series of paintings: imagined covers for the film and pop magazines of his youth, published by Dashwood Books in October 2022, four months after his death.

Hannah began the series in March 2020, locked down in Cornwall, Connecticut. He worked from a trunk of European film magazines collected since the 1970s, titles like Continental Film Review, Ciné Revue and Playmen. He borrowed the logos of real, mostly defunct magazines and painted his favourite actors and musicians beneath them. He called the results "highly subjective dream magazine covers," a form of Pop Art in the line of his earlier Penguin paperback paintings. The book reproduces the paintings in colour across 48 pages, with Hannah's own account of the project and a short text by Arthur Fournier. Hannah finalised the edit shortly before he died in June 2022.

Hannah (1952–2022) grew up in Minneapolis and studied at Bard and Parsons. He was a fixture of downtown New York in the 1970s and appeared in Amos Poe's Unmade Beds. His notebooks from that decade were published as Twentieth-Century Boy (Knopf, 2018). Kasmin's posthumous exhibition Duncan Hannah: On Paper (2023) included works from this series.