Artist and academic shining light on disability artwork
A Teesside University academic and artist has been working with German researchers to ensure light is shone on a previously lost collection of disability artwork.
Professor of Art, Simon McKeown, from Teesside University’s School of Arts & Creative Industries, has helped to lead a project to unlock a previously lost archive, which shows how disability was interpreted in the past.
Coinciding with UK Disability History Month (14 November to 20 December), the international collaboration, involving researchers in Germany, focuses on the disability-related artworks collected by German educationalist Hans Würtz (1875-1958) in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century, from 1910 to 1933.
Würtz, who was known for his prominence in German special education during the time of the Weimar Republic, was an avid collector of artworks related to disability and impairment.
Professor McKeown, an award-winning internationally exhibiting artist who is renowned for his work on disability, has led the work with Professor Oliver Musenberg, of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, who has extensively researched the life and legacy of Würtz.
The project, Images of Disability, which involves the launch of a website with details of the art archive and its history, is a collaborative project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the German Research Foundation (DFG), with support from Teesside University, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the National Medical Library in Prague and the Jedlicka Institute and Schools, also in Prague.
Professor McKeown said: “The material has only ever been exhibited in Berlin in 1932 and in Prague in 2013 at Dox Centre for Contemporary Art, and had never previously been studied in depth. The collection holds immense cultural value and offers a wealth of unexplored material for the analysis of historical images and ‘imagination’ of impairment and disability.
“Würtz’s passionate collecting of artworks related to impairment and disability was set against the political background of the rise of National Socialism, a critical period in European history that saw extreme ableist and disablist thought and action.”
Würtz was amassing his collection at the same time as the Nazi rise to power in Berlin, and it only survived as the National Socialist authorities saw no value in it at that time and allowed him to remove the artworks to his place of exile in the former Czechoslovakia. The collection survived in two Prague-based archives.
The largely unmapped collection includes pottery, ivory and wood statuettes, thousands of images in the form of drawings, cartoons, lithographs, engravings, reproductions from magazines and photographs, paintings and glass plate negatives.
Professor Musenberg said “Würtz's reflections on the ‘soul’ of disabled people no longer play a role in today's special and inclusive education. His collection, however, represents an extremely interesting subject for current disability history and educational history research.”
The Medical Museum, a department of the National Medical Library in Prague, preserves a part of the Hans Würtz collection, including small pottery, ivory and wood sculptures, along with a set of prints and reproductions.
Šimon Krýsl, of the Medical Museum, said: “The work of Professor Musenberg has first allowed us to appreciate its value, richness and importance for history of disability, art history and social history, above all in the first half of the 20th century, as well as the need to address it from the viewpoint of multiple disciplines.
“The project launched by Professor Musenberg and Professor McKeown comprises more than documentation and analysis, however important they are. In presenting the collection in multiple ways to diverse publics, it generates new, unexpected perspectives on both Würtz’s project and the changing imagination of disability in art and in thought.”
In addition, Professor McKeown was shortlisted for the 2024 National Diversity Awards in the Disability Category. The nomination highlighted Simon's cultural disability work, which has included Cork Ignite outdoor lights event, and the Invalid Carriage Register which captures the heritage of disability mobility.
Professor McKeown is also listed in the Shaw Trust Disability Power 100 2024 which celebrates the trailblazers and role models who demand that the strengths and talents of disabled people are recognised. Professor Simon McKeown - #Disability Power 100
