Art historians Griselda Pollock and Jaś Elsner look at the work of Helen Rosenau 80 years after the publication of her seminal Woman in Art: From Type to Personality.

Among the influential migration of European Jewish intellectuals who brought exciting innovations in Art History to Britain and the US in the 1930s, Helen Rosenau was unique in centring gender inert history as early as 1944.

Eighty years after the publication of what she termed ‘my little book’ Woman in Art: From Type to Personality a new volume resets Rosenau’s radical text in full colour, framing it between biographical essays—by Adrian Rifkin, Rachel Dickson and Griselda Pollock—and Pollock’s contextual reading of Rosenau’s stunning originality and contemporary relevance to both feminist and Jewish studies. Art historian and Oxford professor Jaś Elsner joins Griselda Pollock to situate Rosenau as feminist, art historian and Jewish studies scholar who plotted the changing concepts of ‘woman’ across anthropology, philosophy, sociology, law, theology, Biblical literature, history through images.

Buy a copy of Woman in Art from Helen Rosenau.

This event will last approximately 1 hour, without an interval. 

About the speakers:

Griselda Pollock is an art historian specializing in feminist and Jewish studies in art history and contemporary art known for the classic Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology co-authored with Rozsika Parker (1981) and the recent Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2019). In her latest book, she reintroduces and reframes Woman in Art: From Type to Personality (1944) — Jewish, feminist art historian Helen Rosenau’s radical reading of the entire history of art up to modernism through the lens of the social, cultural and symbolic meanings attributed in art and thought to ‘woman’.

Jaś Elsner is an art historian, working at Oxford and in Chicago, with a particular interest in refugee scholars and the history of art historical scholarship in the twentieth century. His most book is Eurocentric and Beyond: Art History, the Global Turn and the Possibilities of Comparison, Beijing: Horizon/OCAT, 2022