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| Jutta Vinzent delivers the Salek Minc Lecture (2015) |
This year’s Salek Minc Lecture was held in conjunction with the exhibition Elise Blumann: An Émigré Artist in Western Australia, 1938–1948 (11 July–19 September 2015) and presented by Dr. Jutta Vinzent, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Research Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. The lecture can be watched here.
The Lecture:
Thank you very much for having invited me. I'm delighted to be here, and again, thank you for the introduction and I'm humbled and I hope I can deliver.The Lecture:
This lecture is indeed held
in honor of Salek Minc, a medical practitioner who also published a series of
articles on the relationship between medicine and culture. Being a
cardiologist, he felt that unresolved emotions suppressed by normed behavior
induced tensions, which may form medical problems such as heart disease. For
him, contemplation and immersion in art could help resolve such tensions. His
view may have been influenced by his own life experiences.
Similarly, to many of those
mentioned today, he was a Jewish émigré from the 1930s. According to Sally
Quinn, who curated and wrote the catalogue for the exhibition Bauhaus on the
Swan: Elise Blumann, An Émigré Artist in Western Australia, 1938-1948, Minc
also knew Elise Blumann personally in the 1940s through émigré gatherings in
Paris.
Born in the Russian town of
Siedlce, which is today in Poland, in 1905 ... I've brought you a picture of
Salek Minc, which is unfortunately small. Minc also knew Elise personally. He
was born in 1905, as you can see. Minc started medicine in Italy, graduating in
1925 to become a specialist physician.
In 1935, the same year in
which National Socialist Germany introduced the so-called Nuremberg Laws
defining Jews by ways and not belief, he left for the UK, [00:02:00] where he
then joined a tourist vessel as a ship surgeon. Arriving in Perth in 1940,
there he continued his passion from the 1920s, namely collecting and promoting
the arts.
It is thanks to him and the
kind invitation of Sally Quinn that I have been able to travel from Germany to
Perth to be here today and speak about Space, Place and Migration in Modern Art.
That's the exhibition and exhibition catalog for this exhibition in which we
are placed, and this is what I'm going to talk about.
During the 1930s, thousands
of refugees left Nazi Germany. Many went to Britain, so that London became a
haven for modern art. It was also in London that "Circle: An International
Survey of Constructive Art" was published, a key book on modern art with
contributions from leading avant-garde artists. Edited by Naum Gabo, Ben
Nicholson and Leslie Martin, the publication dealt foremost with the topic of
space, namely in sculpture, painting, architecture and also in design.
This lecture will consider
these conceptions of space in the 1930s and asks how such interest was
reflective of migrants’ experiences of changing places and expanding spaces. It
will argue that space was a feature relevant beyond a mere formalist analysis
that may stretch to the formulation as I offer to you, which I have termed
provisionally as spatial art history. Continue
