Feminism Meets Art History
Channel: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Date: 28/02/2024

24 January 2024

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.