Obituary | David Hansen

David Hansen (12.05.1958—13.01.2024), one of the most gifted and accomplished art historians in Australia, has died unexpectedly in Hobart, Tasmania. An alumnus of the University of Melbourne, his commitment to historical enquiry underlay much of his astonishing range of contributions to art history, curatorship, and the artistic community. In recognition of the quality and extent of his scholarly publications, the University of Melbourne awarded him a Doctor of Letters (PhD by publication) in 2004.

In 1980, at the age of 21, David was appointed Director of the Warrnambool Art Gallery where he oversaw the building of a new gallery, wrote and published a catalogue of the collection and, with ever alert artistic judgement, provided support for numerous local and regional artists. He wrote a catalogue essay for Rick Amor’s first museum exhibition, held at Warrnambool in 1990. From 1986 to 1988 he was Coordinating Curator for the major survey exhibition and publication The face of Australia, the land and the people, the past & the present, commissioned by the Australian Bicentennial Authority, which toured almost 300 works drawn from 57 non-State galleries to no less than 10 venues throughout Australia, uncovering important and often little known works.

After positions as Director of the Riddoch Art Gallery, Mt Gambier, 1988-91, and Director of the Australian Sculpture Triennial, 1992-93, David was appointed Senior Curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) in Hobart from 1994 to 2005 where he curated numerous exhibitions on Tasmanian art, from colonial to contemporary, including a landmark exhibition and publication on John Glover in 2003. He returned to Melbourne as an Australia Council Senior Fellow in 2005-07 and took up the position of Senior Researcher and Paintings Specialist at Sotheby’s from 2007 to 2014. His most recent appointment was from 2014 to 2022 as Associate Professor, Centre for Art History and Art Theory, Australian National University.

David was an exceptional writer, a stirring educator and a true maverick, keen to explore and challenge what could be said about art and how it could be said. But his experimental instincts were tempered by academic rigour and deep historical knowledge. He had a love of facts and the incontrovertible nature of things in all their concrete sensory details. His was a sharp and perceptive eye, enhanced by an abiding intellectual curiosity and literary flair. His writings on art were as provocative as they were pleasurable to read; his prose was playful, rhythmic and habitually linked ideas together in a chain of beguiling enquiry.

David’s innate empathy with the process of art making, both contemporary and past, was directly expressed in his support for the work of his partner the artist Heather B. Swann and, more widely, in his curating of over eighty exhibitions and a formidable number of reviews and essays. These reveal his ability to move, and see connections, between the past and the present with deep critical insight and to focus, in his words, on the ‘intense historical and cultural specificity’ of the work.

His major exhibitions and publications were, without exception, ground-breaking. John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, 2003, winner of the inaugural Tasmania Prize for the most outstanding book about Tasmania in 2005, opened up the interpretation of colonial landscape painting within both Australian and British historical frameworks. His essay ‘Death Dance’, an exploration of imagery depicting the early colonial Indigenous leader Bungaree, was commended in the inaugural Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Prize in 2007. Next, ‘Seeing Truganini’, a meditation on the role and responsibilities of history in the contemporary interpretation of indigenous objects, won both the Calibre Prize 2010 and the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

In pursuing these themes, David’s aesthetic sensibility was directed towards the power of art and the need for ethical relevance. Ever an independent thinker, he often sought the truth in unlikely places and in works of art that were testimony to the overlooked, the eccentric or the dispossessed. Thus the exhibition and publication Dempsey’s People: a folio of British street portraits 1824-1844, 2017, emerged from his discovery, when at TMAG, of a remarkable series of watercolours that vividly document the lives of people marginalised by mainstream commentary. Research for this project was supported by the Yale Center for British Art, where he had been a Visiting Scholar in 2011, and grants from both the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Gordon Darling Foundation. David’s international standing was highlighted in 2018 when the book won the prestigious William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History. In 2022 and as recently as 2023 he participated in the Attingham Trust Royal Collections Studies program. He was awarded the Nina Stanton Copland Foundation Scholarship to undertake these studies, which enabled the scholarly exchanges and close scrutiny of diverse cultural works at an international level that he relished.

Reflecting his extensive gallery experience, in 2021 David wrote a wide-ranging essay on the history of Australia’s regional galleries for HG:60, the Hamilton Gallery’s 60th anniversary publication. Even more characteristic was his next project, which would prove to be his last, an exhibition on Charles Rodius, the little known early colonial artist who came to NSW as a convict and whose vivid portraits depicted indigenous and non-indigenous subjects with equal dignity. Held at the State Library of New South Wales from June 2023-May 2024, research for this exhibition was undertaken when he was the inaugural Ross Steele AM Fellow at the SLNSW in 2019 but, as he revealed in a recent interview, David was already researching the attribution of works by Rodius when he was a student. His book on Rodius was near completion at the time of his death and will be published posthumously.

Raffishly attired with unforgettable hats and crisp linens, David was dashing, humorous, expressive and eloquent. He was a rare model of scholarly camaraderie, renowned for his sharing of research, attested by emails, postcards and text messages delivering precious scraps of crucial information perfectly matched to the recipient. He was, above all, a model of kindness and his last words from Hobart contained promises of return, of distances overcome, and of reuniting with friends.

Australia’s art, literary and history communities have lost one of their best. Internationally recognised, locally beloved, David Hansen was a brilliant colleague, an exceptional writer and a true friend.

Vivien Gaston with Jane Clark, Irena Zdanowicz, Alisa Bunbury, Ian MacLean, Sheridan Palmer, Alison Inglis, Claire Roberts, friends and colleagues.