Feminism meets Art History 1944/2024:  Helen Rosenau’s monumental Woman in Art, then and now

24 January 2024
5:00 – 7:00 pm
A Paul Mellon Centre Research Seminar by Griselda Pollock, Professor Emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds
Paul Mellon Centre and Online

In 1944, shattering conventional narratives of both art history (the discipline) and feminism, a Jewish refugee, feminist social historian of art, once at the heart the Warburg-Panofsky circle in Hamburg, Helen Rosenau (1900–84) brilliantly rewrote a history of art through the lens of woman as a “symbolic form (Cassirer). Her ‘little book’ was richly illustrated with artworks by both women and men. Just six years later a Viennese refugee, Ernst Gombrich, was allowed to deliver his positivist, frauen-rein (a women-free) “story” of artists (not art). How do we make sense of this contradiction? How has such historical amnesia distorted our discipline? How do we account for art historians’ failure both to denounce Gombrich’s mendacity and to recognise Rosenau’s astonishing scholarship and philosophical depth of analysis as the most sustained product of the intellectual hotbed that was academic Hamburg in the 1920s? In framing and elaborating the theoretical depth of, and the vibrant feminist context for, Rosenau’s wartime book, Griselda Pollock rebuilds the broken chain of cultural analysis, explaining what researching and writing her texts that “frame” the Mellon eightieth-anniversary republication of Rosenau’s original in full colour has done to her own understanding of historic feminist thinking about art and culture and the current challenges of writing of art’s complex, inclusive and self-challenging histories. 

Image credit: Helen Rosenau, Woman in Art (London: Isomorph, 1944)

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About the speaker

Griselda Pollock is a feminist, postcolonial and social art historian and curator. Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds, she also directed the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (2001–21). In 2020 she was awarded the Holberg Prize for her work in feminism and the arts, and the CAA Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art in 2023 having received in 2010 the CAA Distinguished Feminist Award for Promoting Equality in Art. Recent publications include Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University Press, 2022) and WOMAN IN ART: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 (Yale University Press, 2023). She has curated several exhibitions on the work of Christine Taylor Patten and on Bracha Ettinger (Memory and Migration, 2009) her most recent is Medium and Memory (HackelBury Fine Art, London, 2023 catalogue available) and is currently developing, with many colleagues, a memorial exhibition on Judith Tucker, who was tragically killed in an accident caused by a dangerous driver in 2023.