Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 by Griselda Pollock Now Published
- 14 November 2023
Today marks the release of Griselda Pollock's Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944. Now available to purchase through Yale University Press.
Helen Rosenau (1900–1984) was part of the influential migration of European Jewish intellectuals who fled to Britain and the United States during the 1930s, bringing with them exciting innovations in art history’s methods. Only Rosenau, however, centred gender in her analysis. The result – her book Woman in Art: From Type to Personality – is a feminist art-historical project, as relevant today as when it was first published in 1944, in which Rosenau drew on contemporary discussions of gender in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, law, theology, history and literature.
In this new volume, ahead of the eightieth anniversary of its original publication, Rosenau’s erudite and accessible text is prefaced with a personal memoir by Adrian Rifkin, who was once her student, new research into the refugee experience by Rachel Dickson and a portrait of Rosenau as feminist intellectual by Griselda Pollock. In conversation with this new setting of the original text, richly illustrated with colour images, Pollock offers eye-opening new readings of key aspects of Rosenau’s methods, concepts, arguments and interpretations of famous artworks, establishing the place of Rosenau’s ‘little book of 1944’ in the historiographies of both feminist thought and cutting-edge art history across two centuries.
In conjunction with the publication of Griselda Pollock's book on the subject, a digital facsimile of Rosenau's original publication has been produced with kind permission of the Rosenau family.
Griselda Pollock will also be speaking at the Paul Mellon Centre on 24 January 2024. Book tickets.