Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, and Rachel Dickson Win HBA Book Prize for Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944

Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, and Rachel Dickson’s book Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944, published by the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023, has been awarded the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Prize for the best multi-authored volume. Awarding the prize, the judging panel observed:

Bringing together a reproduction of Jewish refugee art historian Helen Rosenau’s 1944 book Woman in Art, an affecting memoir by her student Adrian Rifkin, a useful documentary biography compiled by Rachel Dickson, and brilliant framing essays by Griselda Pollock that contextualise and analyse Rosenau’s text, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ is critically important reading. Contrasting Rosenau’s work to Gombrich’s gender-exclusionary art history, Pollock situates Woman in Art and its author’s intellectual formation in terms of contemporary art historical, anthropological, and sociological discourses and concerns as well as traumatic geopolitical events and the author’s migration and institutional challenges. Pollock’s compelling close readings plumb Rosenau’s long overlooked, politically resonant ideas, making this beautifully produced volume’s challenge to “the violence of decades of continuing silencing, effacing, willed ignorance, and blatant sexist indifference that have distorted the histories of art and the character of the discipline of Art History” as absurdly needful as ever.

Woman in Art is available to purchase via Yale University Press.