Death in all its forms

Bringing together 104 modern Danses Macabre and more than 1000 commented images, as well as 11 thematic focuses, Vincent Wackenheim's work bears witness to the vitality and the durability of an ancient graphic form that many artists of all nationalities revisited it from the 18th century. The thread driver is here to show how these, according to the orientations stylistics of their time, reinterpreted iconic images installed in the imagination since the 15th century, by integrating, from a original structure marked by religious history, themes news, social and political, tragic and burlesque, consequences too of the two world wars. * From the fresco in the cemetery of Saints-Innocents in Paris (1424), that of Basel (1440) or engravings of Holbein (1538), the representations of the Dances of the Dead were codified, reaching a form of universality in Europe. We see couples composed there of a dead person, more or less emaciated or skeletal, and of a living person, who follow in hierarchical order, from the pope to the hermit, from the noble to the lansquenet, from the peddler to the ploughman. The framework is thus fixed, made of anguish and a a touch of irony towards the powerful. Because if equality in the face of death is affirmed, equality on earth is still cruelly lacking. From the end From the 18th century, the Dances of the Dead will experience an astonishing revival of interest, made of appropriation, renewal of themes and a great distancing from the Middle Ages. The extreme readability of the genre, understandable by all classes of society, the timelessness of the thematic, its violence and its popularity inscribed in the collective memory, make artists offer bold interpretations, beyond the Christian references. Aided by the wide diffusion due to the progress of printing techniques, the tempo of the Dances of the Dead is now part of that of modern history, marked by revolutions and unrest social, the persistence of epidemics and a society in full mutation. The shock sensitive, visual and tangible aspect of the war is such that the first conflict of 1914-1918 becomes the central subject of a very large number of dances of death, both in France and in Germany or in England, as well as, to a lesser extent measure, World War II, not to mention the vision of the universe concentration camp or the Allied bombings which, in February 1945, destroyed Dresden. Finally, it is not surprising that, given the situation in the 1950s, and the Korean War, to see the risks of nuclear conflagration being for some artists a source of anxiety that we will find translated in their portfolios. If the Dances of the Dead originally presented a vision sum all reassuring of society, their modern variations now place the individual alone facing death: no grieving families, no mourners, no notaries - only face to face. Death comes to seize the player, the debauched, the coquette, the miser, because of their faults: this leaves one to think that these people could have, if not escaped death, at least delayed it the deadline by leading a regulated life. Each Dance of the Dead thus bears witness to the through an era: the characters and situations that he captures Rowlandson, Grandville, Merkel, Barth or Dyl, reveal the perversions, the ambitions, the conflicts of early 19th century England, of early 19th century France, 1830, from 19th century Germany, from 1920s France, with a focus on Alongside the extreme violence of the boards, satire, irony and humor. The eternal fear of dying – and the desire to prepare well for it, giving pretext for the countless editions of the type De arte bene moriendi, or even for a craze for Vanities – find an extension in these astonishing Modern Dances of the Dead, presenting the moment as a piece of eternity which precedes death, when all is played out, and it then seems vain to wanting to influence one's destiny.