Carnegie Hall

Matthew Hancock is a UK-based designer and illustrator who was commissioned by Carnegie Hall to create artwork for the 2023–2024 festival, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice. His creation—Der Totentanz (Dancing with Death)—evokes the astonishing dualities of the Weimar Republic, a period he calls “one of the most concentrated bursts of chaos, creativity, and madness in recent history.” The piece is captivating in its apparent simplicity, but it is rife with symbolism and thematic references to uncover.

Explore the full artwork below, with exclusive commentary from Hancock.
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The starting gun for this process was a piece of propaganda disseminated by the German Health Department in 1919. The woman represents the city of Berlin, but it’s not clear exactly which type of Death she is dancing with. It could be sexually transmitted disease, Communism, or some kind of general moral decay.

The image is a reference to the artistic tradition of the Totentanz, or “Dance of Death,” which dates back to the late Medieval period. Many countries share this tradition. In France it is known as the Danse Macabre. Men and women from all walks of life and social classes are depicted dancing with a skeletal figure; the viewer is reminded that life is short, and Death eventually comes for us all.

The effect is intended to be incongruous, both silly and terrifying. For me, this incongruity perfectly captures the mood of the Weimar Republic.

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The Bauhaus is one of the most influential artistic movements of this time. Part of the approach was to deconstruct the forms that art and design had always taken. For me, setting typographic compositions at an angle (in this case around 30 degrees) is one of the hallmarks. It plays with the tension and uncertainty that is created when things aren’t exactly as you expect them—and that tension is what gives the piece its energy.

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The dancers are taken from the film A Tango for You. This image, with the dapper couple in the middle and the chorus line in the background, is pure 1920s. The male actor is Willi Forst, and his female partner is most likely Fee Malten.

I wanted it to be a woman dancing with a man, as there is an implied power dynamic there that reflects the Totentanz—Death is always leading the dance! There’s even a slightly vampiric element to the way Forst is leaning over his partner as she exposes her neck.

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Nobody wears a top hat like Marlene Dietrich. Her subversive androgyny is the most iconic image of this period. I had to include a top hat.

Stylistically, the top hat is a nod to Dada. The anti-art movement had a strong showing in Germany. Its embrace of the absurd fits right into the mood of the Weimar Republic. Artist John Heartfield was a master of juxtaposing threatening political imagery with pure silliness.

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László Moholy-Nagy was a graphic artist and part of the Bauhaus school. I was taken by these photo-montages—a series of silhouettes, partial human forms, and empty geometric outlines on a huge field of negative space. They are so spare and balanced. But they also imply a disappearance—remnants of things that were here and are now gone. It’s a little creepy!

By the time of the Third Reich, the Weimar Republic’s artistic legacy had been forcibly eradicated. Its art was labelled “degenerate” and suppressed, and many of its major players fled or were killed. The Weimar Republic burned bright for a moment, and then it vanished.

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6. Red Dress

The dress is red primarily for visual impact. But it also refers to the Girl in the Red Coat from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Fee Malten was Jewish and emigrated to the United States in 1932 to escape persecution.

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The skull or skeleton was used in a lot of the political art of the Weimar period. The First World War was a recent memory, and starvation and disease were everywhere. Politics was literally a matter of life and death. This anti-war poster was created by the Socialists, but there are many others like it from all perspectives. I think on some level, and whether they wanted it or not, many people felt another war was inevitable. It is eerie to look at the young people of this time with our hindsight, knowing what was coming for them.

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8. Gesture

The gesture Willi Forst is making here is part of a careful choreography, but it was interesting to recontextualize it as a kind of denial. In my version, he is violently pushing away the specter of death and the realities of violence, poverty, and unrest to focus on the dance. The pushing gesture is what gives the piece its movement and tension—both visually and conceptually.

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9. Barbed Wire

Barbed wire refers to the realities of both the First and Second world wars, between which this period was a momentary intake of breath. Also somewhere in there are the death camps to which many Weimar artists would be sent. The dancer is pushing it aside so forcefully it has blown apart, as though it had been hit by a shell.

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The yellow paper is a reference to artist Kurt Schwitters. His collages, which he called “merz pictures,” often included disembodied chunks of bold typography.

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11. Typography

The typography on the yellow pieces is the phrase from the original poster that inspired it: Dein Tänzer ist der Tod, “your dance partner is Death.” The handwritten elements are different language’s versions of the term Totentanz: the Danse Macabre, Danza de la Muerte, and so on. Ultimately, it wasn’t just Weimar Germany that was dancing with Death—it was the whole world.

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Photography: Der Totentanz by Matthew Hancock; A Tango for You from Alamy; all other assets are from Wikimedia Commons.