‘Her Heart Belongs to Jewish and Women’s Questions’ (Lutz Weltman, 1951) Art Historian Helen Rosenau’s Jewish and Feminist Studies as Anti-Fascist Defiance (The 2025 Miller Memorial Lecture)

Speaker: Griselda Pollock (Leeds)

Born in Monaco, educated in pre-1933 Germany, with advanced degrees from the Universities of Berlin, Hamburg and London (where she found refuge in autumn 1933), Helen Rosenau (1900–1984) was not only a brilliant and internationally-respected social historian of French art and architecture, but a founding participant in both Jewish Studies in Art and Architecture and feminist studies in Art History, creating the latter field in her ‘Little Book’, Woman in Art, published in London in 1944. 

This lecture will explore two questions. What were the conditions for Rosenau’s focus on both Jewish and Feminist studies? What connects them? A third follows: to what extent were both acts of political-intellectual defiance of the Fascism that drove her into exile and then hunted her? Finally, did that defiance equally determine her commitment to public and extramural education as a social and critical, minoritarian cultural historian?  Griselda Pollock explores the political and theoretical relations Rosenau established between social historical analysis of architecture (‘The Temple’) and of ‘Woman’ and both as a ‘symbolic forms’. By proposing art as a form of thought, Rosenau suggests that its critical, social historical study trains us to defy ‘thoughtlessness’: the state that political theorist, and also refugee and exile, Hannah Arendt, would later discern as the condition that makes evils, such as Fascism, possible. 

The lecture will be held in person at the University of London Senate House, and will be followed by a reception. All are welcome to attend; advance online registration is essential. 

Image: Left: Helen Rosenau (photo reproduced with permission of Michael Carmi); Right: Griselda Pollock (photo provided by the speaker).