Images of Disability
This session will be led by disabled academic McKeown and Musenberg, a Berlin disability scholar who are working together on an international co-operation research project (AHRC/DFG) entitled Images and Imagination of Impairment and Disability in the “Hans-Würtz-Collection”. Between 1912-1932, the German pedagogue Hanz Würtz (1875-1958) passionately collected over 7000 impairment and disability related artworks. In 1932 he created one of the largest ever exhibitions connected to disability and impairment (Deutsches Museum für Krüppelfürsorge). Würtz innovatively moved away from the prevailing medical perspective on impairments to a more cultural perspective that materialised in his outstanding collection. His assemblage uniquely connects art and disability in a cultural manner beyond the status of a simple cabinet of curiosities. Würtz’s activity was set against the political background of the rise of National Socialism.
Würtz’s Collection is unique, because each image, painting and sculpture features a direct or indirect connection to disability. Our accessible panel will provide a unique analysis of the Collection through the lens of the lived experience of disability.
Session Convenors:
Simon Mckeown, School of Arts and Creative Industries, Teesside University
Oliver Musenberg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Speakers:
Alexandra F. Morris, University of Lincoln and University of Nottingham
The Killing Game: Receptions of “Grotesques,” in the Hanz Würtz collection
This presentation will focus on examples of “grotesques” both ancient and modern in the collection of the controversial figure Hanz Würtz and their reception as examined by a disabled Egyptologist. Created in Germany in the aftermath of World War l and the rise of the Nazis to power, Würtz’s collection was intended to serve as a glimpse into the lives of disabled people. Würtz’s collection features many “grotesques” both in the form of print reproductions of ancient art, and in more contemporary examples as depicted in sculptures, cartoons, and other modern prints. It has erroneously been assumed that “grotesques” in an ancient world context were made for negative reasons with negative connotations (Meintani 2023, 385–387). The linking of negative connotations with non-normative bodies was influenced by the interlinking of ancient world scholarship with eugenics (Challis 2014). However, more recent scholarship has instead argued that these depictions “were created in the vein of a carnivalesque attitude linked to religious practice, and that ‘the butt of the joke is not the cripple and the deformed, but rather the Roman magistrate, the rhetor, the athlete.’” (Meintani 2023 as quoted in Morris 2025, 148-149). It seems from a close examination of this art, that Würtz may also have uncovered these more positive associations, and additionally used them to challenge both contemporary societal attitudes towards disability in 1930s Germany and the leading political authority at the time of his collection, making him both a voice against the rising concept of eugenics and a man ahead of his time.
Rachel Gadsden-Hayton, Loughborough University
Hans Würtz’s Collection perceived through the lens of Posthuman Disability Art Practice and cultural activism.
Inspired by Hans Würtz’s collection to abandon prevailing medical perspectives of impairment and disability at the beginning of the twentieth century, and instead, embrace progressive cultural perceptions of disability, evidenced through the materialisation of his vast collection of disability art, and ephemera, this presentation seeks to articulate how Würtz’s unique collection offers a critical tool to consider contemporary notions of Posthuman disability art practice, and disability cultural activism.
My current practice led PhD research considers the representation of Modern and Contemporary Disability art: mortality and activism, and I will presentation exemplars from a 20-year career as disabled visual and performance artist, leading national and international disability art exhibitions, live art performances and social engagement projects, to express how the power of disability art to generate powerful cross-cultural, intersectional dialogues to consider universal notions of humanity.
Consideration will be given to how the disability journey becomes intertwined with the narrative of an artistic practice, creating a unique and deeply personal visual language. The profound interplay between a physical condition, the medical interventions, and the artistic process fosters a distinctive aesthetic that not only reflects a personal journey, but also invites viewers to engage with the profound intersection of health, creativity, and the human spirit.
Underpinning the analysis of objects and ephemera from Würtz’s collection, juxtaposed alongside contemporary disability art practice, will be the consideration of how disability lived experience impacts the cultural ideology of disability art, to ultimately serve as a catalyst to authorizes wider social and cultural change.
Alison Wilde, Northumbria University
The potential significance of the Hans Würtz collection to contemporary disability arts and some dilemmas of disability representation
Cursory glimpses into The Hans Würtz Collection of images of disability immediately poses many questions for current and historical debates about the position of impairments and representation of disablement in art and other cultural practices. These might include reassessments of judgments of disabled people in the history or art, the rights and wrongs of impairment-centred representations, disabled people as the abnormality from which normality makes itself (Siebers,2010), disabled people as spectacle, threat, or moral lesson, and so on. The status of Hans Würtz, as a non-disabled pedagogue and advocate for the integration and welfare of (some) disabled people, also raises questions about the oft-presumed relationship between the impairment status of artists and curators, the promotion of disabled people’s lives, and the conditions of possibility for going beyond pathological or prejudiced portrayals to more ‘accurate’ or representative ones. Further questions arise if we begin to contextualise this collection in the social, (inter) national and political contexts of the time, between two world wars and within an era of disability activist campaigns and cultural shifts which took place well before the emergence of the disability movement. Taking a closer look at these intersecting factors, I will discuss the collection as a whole, exploring several artefacts in more depth.
Simon Mckeown, School of Arts and Creative Industries – Teesside University
The Hans-Würtz-Collection: The Value of a Unique Memory of Disability
Disability sits at the heart of current UK, EU and UN policy. Article 30 of the UN Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities (CRPD) recognises ‘the right of persons with disabilities to take part on an equal basis with others in cultural life’.[1] Seventy years earlier Hans-Würtz, the director of Oskar-Helene-Heim, a very large disability institute in Berlin, Germany, presented a massive art exhibition to argue the same ideal. Disabled people and their representation mattered. His collection featured drawings, cartoons, lithographs, engravings, magazine snippets, photographs and postcards; several paintings as well as one hundred and eighty significant unique pottery, ivory, wood and metal statuettes. Uniquely every item is a representation of or connected to disability in some way. In our analysis we can find that perhaps 50% of the collection has been lost over time, perhaps damaged, stolen or dispersed. That this assemblage, has survived across multiple locations, through war, bombs, dispersal and anonymity despite its inherent fragility is both joyful and a surprise. The processes undertook by Würtz at the point of collection and exhibition, were state of the art. When he didn’t own an original work, or had a magazine cutting (ala Warburg), he used very up to date photography and copied originals; he also copied copies. In doing so he questioned the nature and validity of original works predating the notion of the digital realm and NFTs to contend that what mattered was simply the conceptualisation of his collection. How can we consider his curated data? Würtz was highly innovative in his life time, moving away from the prevailing medical perspective on impairments to a cultural perspective that materialised in his collection. In the presentation, McKeown will question the notion of value in how we assess this unique and highly complex collection.