Griselda Pollock’s New Art History Intervention

by: Yelin Zhao , November 19, 2024

In her latest publication, Griselda Pollock engages critically and thoroughly with the book Woman in Art: From Type to Personality (1944) by German-Jewish refugee art historian and feminist cultural analyst Helen Rosenau. Borrowing the title from Rosenau’s work, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 (2023) is exemplary of Pollock’s feminist interventions, this time in Art History. The two authors have never met in person. In fact, it was not until 2013 that Pollock was prompted to read Rosenau’s book, which was sadly overlooked for nearly six decades but strongly aligns with the arguments she and Roszika Parker advance in Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology (1979). This ‘missed feminist encounter’ (Rifkin 2023: viii) is outlined by Adrian Rifkin in the Preface, in which readers are introduced to the book’s sandwich structure: (1) biographies of Helen Rosenau; (2) a reprint of the Woman in Art (1944) and (3) Pollock’s close reading of the book. [1]

The first part of the book is comprised of four essays, opening with an Introduction by Pollock, in which she sets out the book’s mission to reposition Rosenau’s contributions in Art History by reconfiguring the historiographical landscape of feminist thought in art. The subsequent chapters are biographies. Chapter 1 is a ‘personal memoir’ by Rifkin, who was Rosenau’s student in the 1960s. Through anecdotal information, Rifkin vividly renders Rosenau—to whom he affectionately refers as Helen—as a rigorous scholar, inspiring teacher and close family friend. These recollections offer readers an effective glimpse of the academic and social life of a German refugee intellectual in post-war Europe—mostly in Britain, though some encounters in Hamburg and Paris are also included.

In Chapter 2, Rachel Dickson offers a more conventional documentary bibliography of Rosenau. She carefully traces Rosenau’s personal, educational and professional histories in chronological order with a particular focus on the 1930s and 1940s, after Rosenau’s arrival in Britain as a Jewish refugee in 1933. Part of Dickson’s research is based on correspondence both to Rosenau from her male colleagues and between her colleagues themselves, which are conserved in the Warburg Institute Archive. Through a close reading of them, Dickson underscores the obstacles that Rosenau encountered as a woman while publishing her work and securing academic positions at English universities. In addition, Dickson concisely outlines some instances when Rosenau was positioned among the German Jewish intelligentsia, as war-time support recipient, target on the German Black Book, publishing author and post-war recognition awardee. In doing so, she reveals the significant role that German refugee scholars played in institutionalising Art History in Britain.

Chapter 3, authored by Pollock, is an intellectual biography of Rosenau that carefully dismantles her references to historical textual sources, Hebrew philology and contemporary studies on Christianity and psychoanalysis. Pollock highlights the radicalness of Rosenau’s argument and her ability to synthesise multidisciplinary approaches by condensing them into deceptively simple paragraphs. The second part of the chapter pays close attention to the conditions of Rosenau’s writing as a German-Jewish refugee scholar in wartime Britain, pondering her academic journey and positions in the German and British intellectual communities. Notably, Pollock compares the publication and omission of Woman in Art with the commission and success of Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950). In the last section of the biography, Pollock elaborates on Karl Mannheim’s sociological concepts to illuminate the intellectual formation of Rosenau’s theoretical framework in Woman in Art, as well as her decision to complete the project under Mannheim’s supervision at the LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science).

The juxtaposition of three kinds of biography is intriguing. The three authors have different relationships with Rosenau and distinct approaches to selecting and analysing materials. Their texts, therefore, not only document date-marked events that informed the production of Woman in Art, but also elucidate the book’s formation as the outcome of subjective experiences and perspectives. With their recognition of the significance of a writer’s personal point of view, the three authors embrace Rosenau’s own theoretical approach to analysing art. That is, ‘only from a subjective standpoint can the concept of history be realised’ (Pollock 2023: 105).

The second part of the book is a full-colour reprint of Rosenau’s original publication with minimal—but necessary—alterations, including the substitution of no longer traceable illustrations, the addition of two images, an updated list of illustrations with the latest information and credits, and the compilation of a bibliography. To enable readers to locate this book-within-a-book more easily, the section is printed on glossier paper and framed with a grey half-inch margin. The inclusion of the reprint is strategic. It is a gesture that recognises the limited impact of the original book, which was only published in a single print edition in 1944. While a free digital facsimile can be accessed online, the reprint propels a smoother reading experience, as readers do not need to conduct extra searches.

The book’s third part—the most substantial, occupying nearly half its length—is a series of seven essays by Pollock, in which she scrutinises every element of Woman in Art. Essays 1 and 2 focus, respectively, on the cover and title, and the foreword and preface. Highlighting the vast temporal span of Rosenau’s innovative way of thinking about historical conditions, social relations and symbolic imaginations of woman in art, Pollock positions Rosenau’s project at the centre of her contemporary intellectual development in anthropology, sociology, art history, philosophy and feminism. In Essay 3, Pollock reconfigures illustrations from Rosenau’s book (55 of them across 100 pages), chapter by chapter, by reproducing them as neighbouring plates. In so doing, Pollock plots Rosenau’s visual thinking that transcended the standard Art Historical classifications of style, nation, period, topic and culture. In Essay 4, Pollock traces the book’s formation to five previous articles that Rosenau published between 1940 and 1943 and restores the position of this feminist project in the generational sweep of early twentieth-century feminist scholars. The author continues the endeavour of connecting Rosenau’s thinking with her predecessors and contemporary scholars across various disciplines in Essay 5. By reconstructing the bibliography missing from Woman in Art and compiling a brief intellectual introduction to some of the authors that Rosenau references, Pollock underscores Rosenau’s international multicultural perspectives.

In Essays 6 and 7, Pollock offers situated readings of Rosenau’s book, first chapter by chapter, then in the overarching context of the development of feminist theorisations of time and feminist interventions in Art History. Writing from her generational perspective as a post-1968 feminist thinker, Pollock approaches Rosenau’s analysis of history and culture while considering Julia Kristeva’s concept of monumental time as women’s time, connecting the former’s feminist project between the 1920s and the 1940s to the feminist revolution in theory that took place in the 1960s-1980s.

Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 primarily answers two questions: 1) Why was Woman in Art an important contribution to art history at the time of its publication? 2) What is its significance to us in the twenty-first century? To address the first question, Pollock unravels, to the greatest extent possible, Rosenau’s extremely condensed argument of art as a hermeneutic site. According to Rosenau, art is not merely about aesthetic forms. Instead, it registers and charges the dynamic changes and ruptures in the social-legal-sexual positioning of women and the symbolic-mystic imaginations of Woman. Pollock convincingly argues that Woman in Art epitomises a moment in feminist thought, which was ‘halted, shattered, and dispersed by the rise of fascism and the world war and genocide it unleashed’ (Pollock 2023: 328).

Although innovative in their time, many of the arguments in Woman in Art perhaps do not appear as exciting to erudite twenty-first-century readers who are well-acquainted with the feminist thinking of later scholars, including Pollock. While these intellectuals had not encountered Rosenau’s work, they have nevertheless advanced similar assertions, taking a different theoretical trajectory. Thus, a re-reading of Rosenau’s work requires more than reclaiming ‘this valuable historical text in the history of Woman and art and of this woman in Art History and in the history of feminist thoughts’ (Pollock 2023: 36, capitalisation and italics in original). Instead, it demands a situated close reading of the book (i.e. to approach it with the knowledge of the post-1968 feminist movement sensitised by the trauma of post-war communism and the Cold War) to reflect on the current crisis of feminist interventions in Art History. Just as authors including Ernst Gombrich and H.W. Janson have exiled women from their histories of art, their publications diminish feminist perspectives on the discipline. Even with the ceaseless efforts of a generation of feminist art historians, mostly Anglo-Saxophone, in ‘discovering’ and ‘rediscovering’ women artists, their contributions have been subsumed under the categories of style, region, period, or topic. Hence, Pollock argues that Woman in Art, with its analysis of history with ruptures, transformations and generational shifts, represents a radical challenge to the progressive and positivist patriarchal model of history writing and knowledge production.

It could be challenging for readers, especially those unfamiliar with Rosenau and her contemporary German-speaking scholars, to follow the content in a linear order. On the one hand, some fragmented information is thrown out before it can be completely deciphered. For instance, in Chapter 3, before the reprint section, readers are immediately invited to consider details of Woman in Art, jumping back and forth between a specific paragraph in the third chapter, the book’s chapter headings, and preface. On the other hand, certain knowledge is reproduced more than once in different places, as exemplified by frequent references to Part 1, Chapter 3 in the Essays in Part 3. While they risk betraying Rosenau’s intention for Woman in Art to engage a wider readership, such arrangements serve two purposes. Firstly, they equip the reader with sufficient theoretical preparation to read Rosenau, enabling them to discern the theoretical complexities and originality of her thinking, and thus divert the misreading or dismissal of this ‘little book.’ Secondly, by re-configuring and re-categorising information, the book challenges the linear temporality of reading and opens up alternative spaces for differencing meanings. This is particularly evident in the iteration of Rosenau’s missing bibliography in both Part 2 (the reprint) and Part 3, Essay 5. While the bibliography in Part 2 is in alphabetical order, its counterpart in Part 3 is organised by date and subject area respectively to highlight Rosenau’s expansive intellectual interests and timely engagement with the latest ideas. The same dual-categorisation method is employed for the Bibliography of Helen Rosenau’s publications, placed after the series of essays.

It is also worth emphasising that the book includes a striking number of full-colour illustrations (141 in total), including 55 reprints from Woman in Art, especially considering that this is essentially a book about a book rather than an art book. In fact, most of the names mentioned, whether of artists, art historians, writers, or thinkers, are accompanied by an image of their portrait or their works. Such investment testifies to the success that feminist art historians have achieved in the last few decades. It is therefore a shame to find some typos and formatting errors in this book in which formats and fonts, such as Woman vs. woman, Art History vs. art history, and women artists vs. artist-women, are integral to the process of signifying.

Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 is, nevertheless, a unique and innovative feminist intervention into the historiography of Art History. Rejecting the additive approach of simply ‘discovering’ and reclaiming Rosenau’s feminist project in the 1940s, Pollock carefully sets up dynamic intellectual conversations between Rosenau and other twentieth-century European art historians, sociologists and cultural analysts. Her objective is to present Rosenau as a radical feminist thinker whose contribution was not a ‘little book’ on a straightforward topic in Art History, but a compelling force to shift the discipline’s patriarchal paradigm that continues to endorse progressive and exclusionary historical analysis. In this belated—but perhaps more perceptive feminist encounter with Helen Rosenau—Pollock bridges different ‘generations’ of feminism, not as ‘moments’ but as a ceaseless intellectual project with tenacious rigour.

Notes:

[1] To distinguish between Pollock’s book (2023) and Rosenau’s original publication (1944), structural elements of the former are capitalised and those of the latter are not.