Feminist Art History in 1944?
November 28, 2023 5:00 pm - 7:00 pmRe-introducing Helen Rosenau’s brilliant war-time study: Woman in Art: From Type to Personality
Join us for a talk by Professor Griselda Pollock to coincide with the publication of a new edition of Helen Rosenau’s 1944 book Woman in Art in collaboration with Cambridge Visual Culture.
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 this talk Griselda Pollock will discuss her involvement in this new edition and will reveal a much longer history of transdisciplinary feminist cultural analysis through her analysis of Helen Rosenau’s ‘little book’ of 1944.
The talk will follow with an in-conversation with The Women’s Art Collection curator Harriet Loffler and CVC Chair Dr Amy Tobin. This event will be followed by a wine reception.
Buckingham House Lecture Theatre
Murray Edwards College
FREE. Booking essential via this link
Speaker Biography
Griselda Pollock is professor emerita of social and critical histories of art and director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds.
