Carnegie Hall

Matthew Hancock is a UK-based designer and illustrator commissioned by Carnegie Hall to create artwork for our 2023–2024 festival, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice. His striking combination of modernity with historical imagery, handmade quality of torn edges and painterly marks, and his ability to create dramatic changes in scale made him the perfect collaborator for this signature commission.

Matthew’s 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.

Describe what it was like to work on this piece for Carnegie Hall. What were your biggest fears or challenges? What interested you in exploring the festival theme of the Weimar Republic?

I was, of course, absolutely thrilled! Creatives like to say they only care about the work, and that anything else is incidental. That’s mostly true, but you can’t help but feel a little flush of validation when such a well-known name comes calling. It’s also a helpful bit of objectivity to cling to in those moments, deep into a project, when the thought suddenly occurs, “Maybe everything I’m doing is total nonsense!”

The biggest challenge of this project, but also its most interesting aspect by far, was the sheer amount of material to cover. This little window of time—really only about a decade—was one of the most concentrated bursts of chaos, creativity, and madness in recent history. Every single stratum of society in Germany changed unrecognizably multiple times before it was over. So much of what happened was fundamentally, almost comically, at odds: the decadence and luxury, but also the poverty and squalor; the huge progressive political leaps, but also the near-constant violence; the incredible artistic and technical innovation, but also the retreat into a delusional myth of the past. It’s a lot of ground to cover.

What did you enjoy most about working on this project?

The most enjoyable part of the project was trying to grasp the mindset. I knew about the Weimar Republic in the abstract, but this was really an opportunity to dive deep. The art, design, and photography that was produced at this time really is a minor miracle. There were so many genuinely brilliant ideas arriving seemingly from nowhere. Today, creativity is a primarily economic exercise—we’re all using our ideas as a means to pay the rent. But studying these beautiful, slightly demented people closely, you get the strong sense that they were making things out of sheer anxiety. They all knew what was coming. Within a few years, many of them would be dead. I think they had to externalize that feeling somehow, and we’re left with the bizarre, fascinating results.

Walk us through your general artistic process. How do you typically develop an artistic idea or concept?

Most projects have three stages: gathering, iterating, and finalizing. Depending on the project, these three stages can be larger or smaller undertakings.

Gathering involves immersing yourself in reference material, finding a visual language that the piece can speak in. This was by far the biggest part of this project; there’s just so much ground to cover. This period of history was so full of voices—some loud, some quiet, some angry, some scared, many pretending to be something else entirely. It took a while to realize there was one common voice that was always present: the voice of anxiety.

Iteration is the point at which you embrace the chaos. I always find this a little uncomfortable. Essentially you are throwing a lot of different things at the piece until close observation and happy accident begins to yield a basic shape. Once you have that, you can start to focus in, draw out the things that speak most clearly, and remove the things that are ambiguous. For this project, I made a lot of very silly things. The border between anxiety and silliness is hairline. But eventually it began to feel right.

Finally, finishing. It’s just what it sounds like and is usually the most reliably pleasant part of the process. By this stage you’re confident in the piece, and it’s just a case of realizing it. I add texture, tweak colors and contrast, and make endless minor changes to make sure everything works with everything else. The piece turns from the idea of something into the thing itself. It’s almost always a gratifying “tah-dah” moment.

On your Behance page, you mention that your first brush with the visual arts came when you “began I photoshopping hats on guinea pigs instead of doing homework.” Can you tell us more about this hobby?

I was a very lazy student and got bored quickly (this hasn’t changed). I wasn’t good at sports, and I wasn’t exactly sociable either. Luckily for me, my school had a few banks of computers with Photoshop preloaded. I would spend hours on them, alone or with my little group of friends, making things to amuse myself. I did indeed photoshop my pet guinea pigs with hats, props and costumes. But I also made maps of imaginary cities, fake newspapers, crude websites about mythology, and—memorably—an entire video game in PowerPoint. The IT admin deleted it without telling me because it was taking up too much server space. That was a good lesson on backing up my work. This kind of activity has continued more or less unchanged in the form of my other creative outlet, Mini Mysteries.

Where do you typically find inspiration?

I think anyone working today has the same basic answer to this: the internet. Sometimes I think about how hard (or rather, how expensive) it must have been to stay visually inspired before we could just turn on a tap and submerge ourselves in unlimited visual stimuli. Of course, the downsides are many: visual burnout, the ever-present threat of unconscious theft, dark circles under your eyes, and so on and on. But really, we’re living the postmodernist dream—anything can be juxtaposed with anything else. You just need the psychological fortitude not to go insane. The jury’s out on that one.

Are there any major artists you looked towards for this project and why?

There are really too many to mention, though there are certainly some I could draw attention to. As a collage-maker, it’s hard not to be inspired by Kurt Schwitters. His shadow is long! The Bauhaus movement was full of powerful image-makers, but the work of Marianne Brandt really stands out to me. She had an incredible sense of rhythm and space, stronger in my opinion than her better-known (i.e. male) colleagues. Also, while it’s less of a visual thing, it’s hard not to be inspired by the women of Weimar cinema like Marlene Dietrich and Brigitte Helm. They embodied a kind of confident, androgynous charisma that is highly prized in celebrities today—except it was far more likely to get them killed.

How do you hope this piece of art makes people feel?

I hope this piece carries some of the anxious energy of the period. Working on it, I experienced an uncanny feeling that, although all this took place a century ago, a lot of it is very familiar. Now, as then, there is a strong feeling that anything can and probably will happen. We’re primed for chaos and the unexpected. Many of us have that same anticipatory dread—the sense that we’re living through a strange and florid overture—and that we’re not going to like what comes next.

Photography: Hancock by Ben Wulf, Der Totentanz by Matthew Hancock.