[Music] well good evening everyone uh for those of you who haven't had the pleasure to meet yet my name is Sarah Turner and I'm the director of the Paul melon Center and I want to extend a very warm welcome to all of those of you here in the lecture room at the P melon Center in London but also those of you joining us from around the world and we have hundreds of people joining online so it's always great to have these events where we connect as a a community in the building um online um through
our live stream feed and obviously I think our packed audience um is Testament to the reputation of our speaker Professor Griselda Pollock and also the interest in her new book and here it is I've got my treasured personal copy here woman in art Helen Rosen now's little book of 1944 and which the Paul melon Center published at the end of last year and all of us at the center are extremely proud to have published uh this book and I hope it gives you all a very sure sign of the kinds of art histo
ries we're interested um in funding and Publishing and I think um it represents a kind of art history which is challenging it's complex and it's creative and presents as new understanding of how art histories in Britain have been shaped and written and indeed and I was telling talking to Griselda about that before it's really part of our thinking about the center going forward as well as Accounting in um different ways about how intellectual histories have been written and shaped how we archive
those how we collect them and how we publish them I think the case of Helen Rosenau Jewish intellectual who fled Germany in the 1930s to London and her pioneering feminist art history project has much to tell us about the cultural ferment of mid 20th century art historiography I think much of that history however has been do swallowed up by more dominant narratives and the careful task of recovering these traces has been painstakingly undertaken in this book by gisala with contributions from Adr
ien riffkin and Rachel Dixon and Griselda worked extremely closely with our publishing team here because this is quite a complex publishing project in its own right incorporating many of these layers and traces of history and how you actually do that how you make a book happen um I think is it's really important to kind of celebrate and Mark that moment so I wanted to say as well thank you to our senior editor Emily Lee who I think is sat on the stairs uh because she also had an important role i
nto the final shaping um of this book has did um the designer and The Wider editorial um team and that I think it's quite a unique publication really that not only incorporates Rosen Al's uh text republished with new illustrations alongside brazel's chapters um that provide original insights um into the text but also I think do that bridging work between the concerns of 1944 and 2024 so as a result a little book has become rather a big book um but I hope that Helen Rose and I would also be curio
us about what we've done and extremely proud so I want to give the floor in as much time as possible to Griselda now for her talk so uh many of you will be familiar with her biography I'm not going to read it all out in full but say to consult our website um for more details about the book project and and griselda's uh career and after the talk we'll have time for a Q&A session uh also time to celebrate um and toast toast the book um over um a reception and I think this is a result of many lifet
imes of work so without further Ado please will you all join me in welcoming grisela poit to the p m center okay back to little people down here okay so I just get shorter and shorter I don't know if this is happening to other people over the age of 70 you suddenly find your coat is going along the ground so I'll Stand Up Talk anyway thank you very very much it's an incredible honor to be speaking here four years ago um I came with a proposal um and um like most proposals as was rough and excite
d and all the rest of it but it was welcomed by those at the melon and has been crafted in every physical as well as intellectual way by the incredible pleasure of or the work of of the editorial team the directorships mark Hallet and obviously Sarah atern and I want to thank them to start off with with making this possible I also want to welcome today uh Helen Rosen now's son Helen Rosen now's daughter-in-law and Helen Rosen now's Grand son who are very kindly with us and of course it's a very
emotional moment uh when your your mom-in-law or your mom or your grandma suddenly becomes the object of this such a serious and weighty process of things Etc but uh indeed they have their o her own copy with us so I want to welcome you and thank you enormously for the support you gave me during the writing of this act sharing your archive with me and we went through things and learned a great deal more to give the sort of substance of someone who had encountered um uh Helen rosenan so um my tha
nks are to everybody and we'll see this so we're going to set off on our journey so the first question for everybody is who was Helen Rosenau so she's not just any old thing she's an art historian which was quite an achievement in sense in the beginning of the 20th century born in 1900 she's an archaeologist she is a social historian of art which means she's definitely aware of materialism and on that order of the things we see how that matters to us she was also an architectural art historian s
he's a feminist thinker of a generation that we forget to understand that between the Emancipation struggle and the 1968 are SES of continuous intellectual and political and feminist feminist activity by women but she's also one of the pining jury studies Scholars so she's quite an interesting figure to look at and put together also such a stylish dress so I had to find this we didn't find this photograph for the book but I put it up I know she would have been a woman after my own heart but bein
g very serious about it now suddenly we put aside fashion she was offering us a feminist sociology of knowledge which stands up against phallocentric positivism you're immediately entranced now because you all think what the hell is that wi'll find out but I mean you'll see what positive is was is somebody who doesn't actually think that you need to think at all about things you just need to look at things and tell it as it is but she also recreated for me in art history as an investigation of s
ymbolic form now this was another great puzzle to me because I had not come across this philosophical proposition I'm now terribly skilled at knowing about symbolic form but that will come to but she's also not only therefore a philosophical art historian but one who's working as a sort of in the notion of social historical transformation so she's not thinking that art floats high above the world it's deeply rooted in Social processes so how do you put that all together and make that work so we
look at the publication she's got a great long list of articles but not that huge number of books but if you said how could this give you a portrait of the intellect you'll say oh she's a medievalist and she looks on Christian buildings um the only monograph ever written in England up to 1948 on jacqu Lou David so she writes about revolutionary French artists she's obviously interested seriously in architecture three books here and here's the Catholic cathedrals of of cologne and indeed brayman
and here's the last book she wrote which is the vision of the temple the image of the temple in Jerusalem and Judaism and Christianity in 1979 So What on earth is this book doing amongst the others and how does it relate to the only other book she wrote Bart from the jacu David in the 19 40s which is a short history of Jewish art which opens us into this emerging field of Jewish studies so this is what I have to begin to explain to you now Helen Rosen I was born very exotically in Monaco in Mont
e Carlo because her father was a physician a doctor who ran a spa where else to run a spa but Monte Carlo you would go to Monti um and then they left and went to bat kissun obviously in German bat is a spa so this is as she grew up in a spar Town very elegant as you can see and um we're going to jump now to 1982 when she writes to somebody and we have this fraction given by by Mike and Louise I wonder whether you have ever heard of my little book which is where we get the title from which was pu
blished by isomorph for 1943 yes it came out in November 43 so we are matching the 40y year anniv or the 80y year anniversary which was published by isomorph my title is woman in art and it immediately sold out lucky thing I mean never had a sold out book and it immediately sold out my friends rged me to have it republished perhaps with a post face or a new edition would you be at all interested now we do not know who Madam was but clearly um we are answering that finally now here is her own cop
y inscribed photographs provided by Michael and Lou here um so I wonder if she was suddenly inspired by the fact that all through the 1970s she witnessed book after book after book after book after book being published about women artists from why have there been no great women artists to our hidden Heritage to women artists to women artists to women in art history of painters and maybe she said well maybe this is the moment people will like to republish my book now in Britain the only books tha
t came out in the 70s about this was Germaine gre's horrible book The obstacle race in which she says there could never have been great women artists because their egos were so damaged by patriarchy that they could never achieve anything so it's a sort of social pathology of women's damaged egos so we're not too fond of that one um because it competed with of course mine of course you can put aside things but our book um Rosie Parker and my book of mistress's women art and ideology which getting
a little closer to um Rosen now's title was actually finished in 19 1979 although it took a rather long time to get published um the other book that's probably not on your agenda is in fact a very interesting French book franois Doon who is the founder of feminist ecology she wrote already about ecological issues in 1970s um but she wrote the so the history of Art and and gender struggle as a reply to Nikos hajila Nik I GNA see Nikos hajila um history of Art and class struggle which came out in
1973 but in 77 she gave an answer to it which is already way ahead of anything that my lot ever came up with but it's going to be republished in France soon so here is a a a later picture of Helen Rosen now and she was a feminist since the 1920s went to a lecture I'll tell you about that she was an arti historian trained in Hamburg which is a very serious place to be trained as an arti historian and she became a lecture and Senior lecturer at University of Manchester from 1951 till her retireme
nt in 1970 but she still continued working and teaching in London thereafter but you'll see there's a gap between 1930 when she finishes her PhD and 51 when she gets a post right and it's that gap of being an exiled immigration you know a refugee in Britain trying to find a a place in the academic world and you'll see that she's part of a group who didn't find it compared to all those kned glorious men who did but we'll talk about that shortly okay so I want to go back to the 79 which is a misse
d encounter I'm sure everybody's recognizing who's here that was gisel de poock in 1972 um I was a feminist since 1966 I've been a feminist activist since 1970 I was a PhD student uh finishing my PhD very belatedly uh in 1980 and I too was a lecturer at the University of Manchester um but missed her and nobody ever told me that she had been there before me it's kind of very serious and although I'm retired I'm still working obviously but the most uncanny in coincidence is caused by this I showed
you the last book she wrote the vision of the temple which was published by uh Robert oresco who had founded his own imprint he was a student of vitkov who was another of the German Jewish refugees who came to Britain and he was an architectural historian so this is perhaps how the link came but he also Robert aresco commissioned me as a graduate student to write my first two books on the basis of which I eventually got my job at leads because it's good to have Publications they didn't probably
look at them very much but he also commissioned old mistresses so these two books the manuscripts for these two books lay side by side on his desk and I find that very um poignant sometimes even more teary move moving but crucially interesting about the end of one academic life and the beginning of another but NE I never knew about her and that's what I'm kind of interested in is how could one generation emerge but never know that there was one before so let's go back to 1940 to 44 the years in
which Dr Helen Rosenau uh wrote this book she did not write it at the courth hold at but she wrote it at the London School of Economics why well because of Professor sorry let me go back uh Professor Carl Manheim who was another Refugee from the University of Frankfurt who was her supervisor and he enabled her to write this feminist and sociohistorical analysis of woman as a symbolic form analyzed through images now so we're not going to be talking about women we're not talking about women arti
sts we're talking about an idea and to be a symbolic form is it's something that is thought it's abstract it's not the real thing it's the abstract idea of something and we have to work out what woman is the abstract idea of it's not just the name of persons who might either be born like or choose to be considered women it was sold out it's an independent publisher so we need to think about this very interesting formally a paperback in 1944 a mere eight years after the first paperbacks came out
plastic and ringbound reasonably priced I've rechanged the site I think it's more like10 than 25 but on the cover is this very interesting uh now very well-known figure it's not a Venus I called it a vindor figure which you can see here how tiny it is it's 11 cm so this is not a Monumental piece of sculpture but it was only excavated in 1908 which means this idea that something like this was made 33,000 years ago or before the Common Era is a phenomenon of the early 20th century there a very cru
cial thing which is not it's very is very old but its knowledge its presence in our knowledge resources is part of the early modernist period And this is the back of the book and notice it's an academic book because it has Helen Rosen now Dr Phil PhD because she had not only a PhD from Hamburg she had an incomplete second PhD which was required in Germany to teach in a university you have to have two which was interrupted in the University of Bourne and then she did a third at the University of
London at the cold this is one of the very first people to do a PhD at the cold founded in 1932 right and this is number one of the isomorph series lots of others planned none of them ever happened because wartime publishing was not a good time to launch something and it was WR produced by man called Anthony fros hog who introduced bow house design to Britain in terms of book publishing and he's a very important figure and if you're interested this wonderful book by Robin kin Ross documents the
whole project of this transnational exchange between bous modernism and him so we've got a really interesting little book and this cover combination is again crucial because she's not talking about a lineage from from 33,000 years before the Common Era to a work by a contemporary sculptor she's laying them side by side and this I find this little photograph of 1932 just as Barbara Hepworth is trying to move Beyond figuration into something that's going to be more symbolic or abstract here we hav
e a figure of woman produced by the kind of modernist sculpture that's being inspired by the discoveries of these pree preclassical nonwestern works so brilliantly with the designers we've come up with a way to recreate that um Cover Book you can see 1944 100 Pages 55 illustrations black and white 2024 388 Pages 35139 illustrations thank to the Holberg prize thank you very much this is what paid for it all Illustrated in color so we now move I hope to my second question why is there a big book a
bout her little book this seems a little out of keeping so what's in the big big book contents um this is why you have to see this this little gray stripe is the original beautifully packaged inside this unbelievably heavy book and that's what we've done with color so it's got a new bibliography and it's also in full color a new part one with Adrian rivkin a personal Memoir because he is her student and was mentored by him by her and he's the one who said to me um casually about 10 years ago don
't forget the little book by Helen Rosen now and I thought difficult to forget a book I didn't know about I better just smile sweetly and find it which I could do then on the the internet and discover to my horror how a whole feminist career had gone by without knowing it the second person is with the wonderful Rachel Dixon from The Ben Ori Gallery who's here who wrote uh a very important article tracing the literally the experience and the documents that document her experience as a refugee sch
olar in England I personally never use the word emigra because emigra are voluntary you decide don't like the French Revolution I'll often go to some other place in Europe these are refugees these are people who were in fear of their lives and had lost their livelihoods so this is a very important thing and we discover some very important things I'll mention later by Helen and then I've done an intellectual portrait of Helen rosenow using a little chapter of the book where she uses rodan's figur
e of laon of thought which is C from C clell but how she just as a reading of just this passage of how how she uses this idea um to enable us to have a portrait and then as some of you will know that I'm I'm given to writing a lot so I then did a reading of the book in seven essays but they're short little um you so you don't way down you can do one a night if you want know okay um and that's quite this so this is how it got long so I analy the cover and the title The forward and the preface the
plates and the method the process and its feminist context I formulated a a bibliography and analyzed it I then read the chapters to try and make sense what kind of feminist art history is this that she's producing and how and then I put it in the context of the kind of intellectual formations of the Contemporary between women's Time feminism's Time arts time and Jewish time to try and see all these different temporalities that the work in and then there's some personal after after thoughts now
I'll put the question again why did I write a big book now about her little book of 1944 just a small few questions for you to think about but that's really the heart of it this does require us to rethink what you have le been taught as the formation of art history what has been left out and what it means for the ways in which I think the present moment of people talking about what feminism and feminist art histories is being seriously misunderstood because of a missing sense of its already hav
ing a place in the debates about what art history is and why this is happening in terms of Britain so let me speed up a little bit so these are questions that we have to how is it that a book could become so invisible in 30 years why was its memory lost by the time we were compelled to pose the question of women art in gain art again in the 1970s and what did I or shall we learn by reconsidering this book in the conditions of its emergence and in the context of becoming compelled to think about
it and to think with it so it's not just recovering missing feminist memories which was the title of what I lectured on in 2014 but that this is a damning critique of the bareface sexism of art historiography let alone of the art historical profession in Britain by 1970 and there is no two ways about this this is not a anything that we can kind of juggle with it's an actually a political um and ideological project that happened now this is all the more shock shocking because Helen Rose now has t
he most impressive art historical credentials of anybody she starts her studies with Heinrich Verlin now any of you who are artist da know he's Mr Big right he's absolutely the founder of a major intellectual form even though people like to kick this so and said we don't want to go formalism we are nowhere without formalism this is one of the most important series you see really principles of art history serious work and she started art studied art history for 20 years and then she studies um wi
th these amazing medievalist somewhat less famous in terms of General Paul clemon aldol uh goldshmid and in fact the first woman to be a professor of classical art history in Germany Margarita bber who was in Britain another Refugee in Britain in 3334 um she has a dill from Hamburg a dill from bremond and when she goes to Hamburg she's studying with the very very very young Owen panowski who has just got his first Professor professorship um who was also a student of gold Schmid and Bieber as med
ievalist we have to bring in Dora MOS panowski she did marry panowski and lost her own identity for a moment Etc but she's an AR historian she's in Hamburg and of course ABI VOR so she's in the hottest place to be studying art history in the middle of the 1920 20 s and she does a PhD on architecture but so she's not looking at a verlan style of architecture she's digging into the absolute base now Cologne Cathedral has is I think begins in the 4th Century right and then you know takes until the
19th century finally to get its spires but she's down in the basement saying what is the conceptual idea that is planted by the layout that you can start with because as you can see this is this an Andrew cross most um if you go to most Cathedrals you've got the other crosses not the Greek cross Etc so you've got a long transcept and then the cross but this is mid cross so this is very interesting she gets her PhD because she's doing it with panowski who was also an architectural artist d who in
24 wrote this unreadable book called um perspective as symbolic form well I'm sure some of you have read it and teach it with confidence and understand what he was talking about but I I I I I was but so that's very important because he himself was doing medieval architecture and doing this model she then goes to brayman and here she is on the corner leading an archaeological dig again under this other Cathedral for her habilitation habilitation thesis aren't they remarkable these are such extra
ordinary buildings but she's down in the sort of fifth sixth seventh eth century cryp trying to work out where they first made the structures before they got layered and layered and layered so she's pretty good so I'm going to reinstate her here's this picture from Emily lavine's dream world land of humanist VOR casir panowski and the Hamburg school well I'm sorry the banker has to go and we're going to put her in there and on the left is an cira who wrote the philosophy of symbolic form Abby vo
rg who produced the idea of the Builder Owen panovski who writes perspective and so now we are going to put her there so that's what I think first thing I've done is to try and get this to understand that women art historians are part of art history's theoretical and me and methodological Pantheon now to justify that we have to look at the book so you're going to look at this list and say Wives and Lovers motherhood and further aspects of creativeness oh how disappointing you were ra your hopes
were raised but if we understand Woman as a symbolic form a symbolic form it's an attempt to give a form to something so you can think it and what you think when you think woman are the social relations of kinship which is what cloud Ley Strauss will come up with um which involves the legal relationship of marriage so you have to put aside all your anxieties about who is going to have civil Partnerships or get married or not this is just it's a universal Institution for the exchange of goods you
exchange children one way and you get Goods back right that's all it is so if you're going to have children to exchange you've got to have legal control over the product of what happens when men and women have sex they may produce children which are then oh okay you can have my child and I'll have your camels right and this is the fundamental Le straussian notion of what kinship does but there are also erotic relations of Desire now there's lots of forms of desire right but in this particular c
ase women articulate certain uh institutionalized erotic relations of desired and therefore institutionalize the in non-institutionalized the other kinds of relationships that are excluded from these legal manif you know theological and sociological things there are the passions of the body there are social roles within a certain division of labor in an institution there's the issue of generational change and also as we get towards modernity woman articulates a struggle for creativity and agency
so once you have those in mind you can go and look at Art because you say how does it articulate not a woman or women or images of women and images of men but these constituting relations that produce linguistically the terms of the exchange or the terms of the system or the terms of the ways of thinking bod's desires eroticism generation and agency okay so I just move on here so um I just tend to interrupt this because we need to go back to two things to get woman into con woman in art in cont
ext which involves the politics of the moment it's written so 44 is the moment it's written so that means Helen Rosen is escapes from Germany when her uh because of the first one of the first laws that the Third Reich passed or even before the third re the National Socialist were their pass is to deprive all Jewish people of the right to an employment in any government with so you have to to go somewhere else to to even be able to live so she comes to London and tries to obviously get into the E
nglish British academic world by writing a thesis on the history not of cathedrals but of the synagogue now this is a little obvious okay I could hide behind being a Christian medievalist even though I'm Jewish but no no she's going to ABS to do it on the architectural form and this is because this amazing synagogue was excavated in 1932 so it's another thing that surfaces right in this period And although everybody will write the books about Clark Hopkins I just want to remind you that it was e
xcavated by two people Clark Hopkins and Susan Hopkins who both excavated this synagogue now why is this interesting is because as you know and I'm sure you've been reading recently as you've been marching in the streets about Titus 2881 t e who was a Roman Emperor who in the Jewish Roman War captured Jerusalem destroyed the second temple and exiled all Jews from Jerusalem never allowed to come back into Jerusalem and he brought the treasures in Triumph to Rome so if you've been watching your wh
ichever Raiders of the Lost Ark or whatever it is there's a whole lot to think they still think these Treasures are somewhere in the catacombs of Rome and here they are being brought back to Rome and here they are on the walls of Europa so this is what I call the Nan of the Jerusalem Temple which will eventually produce her book about this idea not of the going down under the cathedrals but to understand this formula this architectural formula of the temple as something that persists and gets re
incorporated and Rewritten but at the same time she's writing this when most of the synagogues in Germany would were destroyed on pogram night rice pogram night 9th through 11th of November this is a synagogue she knew well this is what it was left like so my argument is that her turn to Jewish studies was a Defiance of Third Reich Fascism and as um we've sort of discovered in a sense this wonderful discovery that that we've made you've made it sorry um that Helen Rosen Now's name was in the bla
ck book for all for the Jews who would be arrested if Germany conquered Britain as everybody thought it was going to in 1940 so she's writing about the synagogue on the cusp of potential destruction so I think was her feminist study of women in art also an anti-fascist socialist feminist Jewish Defiance of the Third Reich so I want to put these in relationship to each other as a crucial element okay let's go okay third question was her woman in art therefore as an art piece of art history in som
e way a response to this key idea that vorg put forward in in in Hamburg which is that we study AR's images which are carriers of not symbolic meaning but pathos they're the carriers of certain kinds of affective states which are articulated through gestures and certain compositions and that's what means the L labor is the The Continuous life of certain ways of formulating these uh unform things like ecstasy or anger or desire or rage or violence into formulas of that persist and recur when peop
le wish to articulate that so this is what a a lecture would look like vook which rather looks not unlike a good PowerPoint actually uh when this is how he laid it out so so recently they reconstructed the whole thing and you could see this Grand scale this tracing of the Persistence of certain formula of these uh violence death so my experiment was to put all the images together from her book and see whether I could see this so we go back to Wives and Lovers motherhood and further forms of crea
tivity what would ask happen if you looked at the illustrations the images she chooses as posos formulate these formulations of certain states of mind or emotions Etc but of kinship desire and the law that would be the couple of generation affect and life which would be the parental child what we call motherhood they there's no proof of fatherhood so you can't have a posos formula of fatherhood in the same way you can of motherhood and then in the modern times of Singularity and agency how do yo
u start erupting out of the sociological and cultural structures of that kind so I don't think it is purely that but I think it's a very interesting exercise then a fourth question why did I combine a bibliography by author by date of publication and subject area because it reveals what sources that she was building on which then itself reveals the persistent engagement in 19th and early 20th century anthropology with the question of kinship of these double relations the the the lateral relation
ship between adults and the vertical relationship between generations and these are cross-cultural these are anthropologists studying the almost Universal incidence of societies having ways of organizing that and they're all different but they start to begin so it is crucial because it denies 19th century scientific arguments of scientific or biological basis for difference they are all constructed but it's not constructed sociologic it's actually symbolically constructed to articulate meaning I
also found out then how many uh subject areas you know how much psychoanalysis was that how much sociology was in there how much philosophy was in there how much literature was in there not a lot of art history they're not writing very interesting things and also how many women how much of these major developments in anthropology sociology and the rest in the 19th C were equally being produced by men and women two crucial that you need to understand one is Gertrude kinnel zimmel some of you wil
l know of who gor ziml is but gude kinnel zimmel was uh an artist studied in Paris showed in the aong then married geog siml and they Co created an intellectual circle with Mariana and Max Faber any of you've done sociology 101 Max no it'll be Max Marx vber durkheim and talot Parsons these again miss out uh her and Rina Maria rker Rin Holden s lepsius she's the painter on the right here she joined the women's movement she moved into philosophy and she published under a name and what is her book
reality and legal regulation in sexual life so absolutely spot on for this chapter she is joined by Mariana vber and this is hardly a photograph a painting of a great intellectual so you'll see I we'll see in a minute but I lined up there's a whole series of these incredible women including Jane Harrison who are absolutely changing all these sociological anthropological classical feelings now this is make now she's this is much fiercer this is a serious intellectual look if you cut out out the p
retty dress um these are her books from 1906 to 1948 occupation and marriage wife and mother and the development of law the question of divorce Authority and autonomy in marriage on the valuation of housework women and culture women and love the fulfilled life so once this seems to me a crucial way of being able to read with whom is Helen Rosen now in conversation once we put her back into the categories established in the fist sociologies of zimmel and Marian vber we know she went to hear G zim
mel lecture so she's the bearer of this into this book now if we read the text I'm just going to move on a little faster um and you can read about the preface but we're going to find that she's mobilizing a sociology of knowledge as social history of art she's no mobilizing anthropology she's mobilizing get that I thought may this get slow more slowly um the idea of not women as having inherent Char characters but has social and psychological beings now that's really crucial for our contemporary
ways of thinking because we either have feminists engaging in sub questions of subjectivity and psychoanalysis or we have the sociological Trend but you don't hold these two together and that's I think what she dares to do why this is important is because she was working with Carl Manheim and this was the great Revelation for me because if you go to any sociological Community they say oh yes yes yes yes you know art history no we have no knowledge but he is in debate in conversation I'm going t
o jump on this a bit further with uh our friend okay now I'm going to have to do this slow with Owen panovski because they are all reading art history in order to work out this question of how how you take social systems but also Imagine mentalities right how do we understand how people thought about the social systems or articulated the social systems they're living in that's partly what we do as art historians we take the things that people paint or make or build but then we try to say they ar
e the product of social systems but they're not caused or determined by them they do something specific which is to g a symbol form to a a Liv but it happens through a certain kind of formal process but also through a mentality and this is what the sociology of knowledge is knowledge is just just I'm thinking and it because it comes out of my brain it's all out of me or it's just pure thought it's sociological and it's sociological because your thought can either be the status quo that you think
within the frames or your thought can be imaginative and then transformative so his major books are the sociology of knowledge and the ideology and Utopia I how do you have a kind of repeative and obscuring thought or how do you theorize something that is potential transformation and what that needs is time which is then his other major thing is the theory of uh Generations because what makes one generation think differently from another generation okay so when you're doing history of art they
say oh in you know you know early Rance they thought like this and then they thought like this and then we come the Barack and they think like this and you just trace the symptoms of this but you don't understand why that change happened right why there's a carajo after Michelangelo is the there's some inspiration but they are completely different structures pictorially and symbolically and this is where we find from Jazz ellner that Manheim and um panowski were in conversation about this and in
deed very famous thing if you're taught iconography is that I you know iconography is where panowski talks about what's the meaning of tipping your hat right but the original anecdote is manheim's anecdote when he runs he has a little story about how to understand different kinds of mentalities and actions as ethical and political and it's about somebody giving money to a beggar and it's not just the gesture it's actually the mentality of the person who makes the gesture and he says this man was
selfish because he wanted me to be impressed that he'd given money it wasn't about the charity so we have this really interesting linking of the art historical conversation with these people who are precisely the ones in which she's doing on the other hand we have another side of Manheim the only other person doing a a feminist project at LSC side by side with Helen Rosen now and I must move on because you're going to watch your drink soon um is Viola Klein who was another Refugee from the Czec
h Republic a Jewish refuge in the Czech Republic and she is doing a project with him called the history of an ideology the feminine character so what she's doing is mobilizing this book to analyze the writings of the major figures at the end of the 19th and early 20th century who are theorizing what we will call woman as symbolic form or this condition so you've got Havelock Ellis Otto vinger Sigman Freud um the vings I mean you some of you will know this Margaret me and she is analyzing all the
different ways these people are trying to think these um Concepts precisely or think as it were these two sets of relationships right the lateral relationships and the generational relationship which we might call sex and gender and analyzing where they are ideological I.E containing themselves in something that will be fixed and where they are transformative giving us a way out of the fixed vision of what we think of the patriarchal and that lies side by side with Simon DEA so we've got to put
Helen Rosen now now in a a feminist genealogy as well as an art historical genealogy because that is exactly what Simon DEA was researching more or less at the same time using the same terms of reading myth reading history Reading literature to see how people had formulated these key IDE ideas and in 49 she published this first chapter uh on looking at psychoanalysis looking at the serialists looking at you know the marxists how did they explain this question because she's trying to talk about
not you know a different side of this thinking of woman she's analyzing the myth so she's in man manham analyzing the ideology of gender right and what she says is this ideology of what she's calling a myth is fixed it's like a static myth projecting into a platonic Heaven a reality grasped through experience or conceptualized from experience I we live it or we try to grasp out of experience some way of gripping it and it transposes this um diversity for fact value and empirical law it substitut
es a Transcendent idea Timeless immutable necessary now I don't need to press this but of course the Eternal feminine this notion of woman in this late 19th early 20th century think she's analyzing this becomes an absolute truth so thus to the dispersed contingent multiple existence of women Mythic thinking which is her term opposes the Eternal feminine unique and fixed so that if anything happens that we we cont that contradicts it when women behave and say I got a brain or I don't want to do t
his women are failing to be proper women we all know this but once we put these together I don't to go into that anymore um but Manheim is interesting because he's the first person to teach the sociology of gender at the University of Frankfurt in the 1930s that was a surprise to me um one of his many phds was jizel fre the great photographer that some of you know and this is Emily if you're still there Emily one of her great pieces of page setting where she created this jck to position which I
thought was a lovely little queer moment in this this whole thing about um Adrien Monier photographing her love of Gizelle fre looking across at um Virginia wolf and of course I have this fantasy that Manheim Rosenau jisel FR and Virginia wolf had a dinner party and met in 19 39 okay so I'm going to finish so what do we learn by reading this now there's too much for you so I'm going to tell you you have to read the book now but I'm just going to show you how wonderful it is when you start lookin
g at images in this way because you're not looking for who made them you're not you're not ignoring when they were made but you're not tying them to that type but you're seeing this diversity of inscriptions of these fundamental social legal theological relationships we call marriage or love or eroticism and here you've got rusan marriage funerary marriage you've got one in the British Museum of the formation of this idea of what is marriage with these taking of the right hand which those of you
know the vanik painting you'll know that happens again you've got orus and about the loss of a love you've got humor you've got uh political intellectuals working together you got scientific eles you've got sociologists how do you figure a couple of intellectual equals how do you figure scientists how do you figure thought how do you figure politics this becomes an interesting thing how do you figure power again and this one also um the question of intellect and some of these are more varied wh
at as we move to how inadequate this kind of representation is of women thinkers to some of the more interesting 20th century photographers most of whom were queer who were doing these amazing images of women intellectuals come on move forwards how do you have think about women as revolutionaries how do you think about women as Anthropologist sociologists a suffragette and composer like Ethel SMI how do you do cross cultural analysis of the different societies and one of the things I found so in
teresting in this book was to discover how many of the German Jewish refugees became made major Scholars looking at uh African art particularly there um AA meitz who's became a major figure documenting and was indeed made a queen in Ghana for her work in relation to her very long study of um of a Shandi of Art in in the particular areas different areas and lived there for many years um how you know does uh CA Kish who's a very important figure who became the first professor of Indian art appoint
ed by the Indian in Kolkata in 1924 um and of course political diversity in terms of things the inscriptions of what we call motherhood if we call it generational relationship whether you're looking at hathor amongst the Egyptians um emis um or Diana of Ephesus uh in late classical things Celtic images of the northern European peoples of the matroni the Catholic vision of this very strange thing of the opening virgin um right the way through to um uh Angelica calman as other Greek story Etc but
through to these different instances of motherhood some violated some bered some the elective Affinity of Steph mothering what kind of mothering happens without bearing children so these are completely expanding our vocabulary self articulation is a creative subject and I have to make one more thing about this so look at these images there are women in her book uh in particular and we'll see where they come from there's a lot of women artists in her book in 1944 some of these images come from um
one of the Publications that came when fiden came to London so these are the women artists who are documented in the 500 self-portraits that um and we find them occurring if I lighten them up in her book she looks to China she looks to Medieval art she's looking at the different ways that religious law impacts the goer is about divorce this in decipherable image is either an unhappy couple or um a man a woman with her client but she loves this picture of workingclass love this is how she descri
bes the Picasso there now you can see how you can start to write a long book asking your questions and I want to just come to this one because if you start start with the vindor figure 33,000 years ago you think oh there you know it continues it's continuous it's discontinuous it's diverse it's complex it requires all the skills of an art historian to read all these images which is a work that was made in 1937 so this is Barbara he with the 1930s kind of classicizing primitiv vising a little bit
in the kind of terms that we shouldn't be using I should never have used that word but borrowing from a number number of different more formalist Traditions outside of the European European tradition but this is the great breakthrough and it's exhibited in 1937 and it's the same idea how do you represent Singularity of something which isn't phallic right so everything is interesting to do with how you have a rising form how you have a form of a certain kind of fullness of the form that doesn't
requ require us to have the sort of specificity of the breasts and the um vagina as you have in the other so this work was I said only excavated in 1908 so the modern work is part of this moment where the back history of art is being broken through by excavations in the late 19th early 20th century which carbon dating will emerge in the late 19th century early 20th century to enable people to confirm something that breaks out of the Western eurocentric Christian entric classical entric vision of
what the history of art is and the modernists are of course challenging that but the type to personality type is the philosophical term used in in the symbolic form philosophies but personality is the registration that history has has changed the typologies right this is the radical and one of the things that all the sociologists that she's drawing on all the anthropologists is what happens when modernization unsettles everything and out of that of course will come the women's movements of the
19th century the 1798 through to the 1898 through to the 1970s that we're all in that part of that process so I want to just finish if it will go forward is when we end the story of chifra with these works it's not about the art historical explanation of how you go from figuration to abstraction but how you could read these as a formulation in the vorian sense of a a formulation of a certain paos the posos of individualism or the posos of of the the tunus The Duality or how you could imagine thi
s as symbolic aesthetic Works in preclassical art that now become intelligible in terms other than the verlan story of Art and you ask yourself how do you figure Singularity or relationality and that depends upon this relationship between what was found before you know the preclassical that is discovered now the this is where I'm going to to finish because we have to bring these two things in within six years years of her publication this book arrived from a young man with no credentials much wa
ndering around the vorg got commissioned by fighten his only reason to be commissioned was he'd written an art history book for children and this is the most infantile book ever written conservative positivist but so destructive because he says there's no such thing as art there are only artists and you've probably read that sentence so many times but that is the killer because everything I've talked to you about so far is about art this is women in art it's a completely different understanding
of art that does not require us to have Heroes monographs biographies oh the suffering oh the anguish oh the stories of all of these things now this book of course is not a story of art but a story of artists but it's devastating it sold 8 million copies it's in 30 languages there is no one in this planet who has ever studied art history who has not been contaminated by this book right artist women in this book zero in all of those editions except Kate kovitz in a German Edition they conceded no
w look at fiden Donella linci than God this is the beginning of an art history of of artists and this has trapped women feminists into writing books about artists we can find them again we can have this exhibition in Madrid we can have this another one in America in Baltimore we can have great women artists we can until I can't we bother to have buy anymore we've got them and then we will get the most obscene book and this is so serious I mean this is not a joke because this book is the story of
artists without men or feminists we all know that and it's taken me a long time I will stand up and say this this is complete exposure of someone taking over the kind of whole 70s work of recovery but why has it won the all these awards that has never been awarded to any of the brilliant books by Linda I'm sure lind's probably deserves them more than any of these things but I mean why is this we are in this situation but it's because of that moment of the 1950 I used to think it's just the begi
nning of the 20th century but we can now date the contest between the kind of art history that Rosenau brought to Britain and elaborated in this little book with this particular phenomenon and I see this why it matters that we understand the difference between monographic art history which ultimately now serves the market it's a brand an artists are being trained to have brand to sell themselves by a practice as opposed to this great philosophical study of what art is as an attempt to think and
formulate these structural relations okay so why did British culture adopt and reward the conservative patriarchal Scholars I recommend you read Perry Anderson who analyzes this moment in who came to Britain who stayed in Britain who left in Britain who was ignored by Britain because the British hate synthetic orders of thought right they love positivists you mention you begin to do this and I'm sure you're thinking this is not about art she's all talking about Theory I don't want to read anthro
pology God knows what casir is talk about symbolic forms well I'm sorry you can join the conservatives you know you can be part of a dis distin instinctive aversion to the very category of totality of thinking systems right and when we look at what happened who came to Britain who was rewarded so there is a white migration sir ER Gish sir car poer sir Lewis namia sir isai Belin Sir Nicholas perner who are all anti- theoretical positivists who never got a decent job the red migration Isaac Deutsc
her was ignored by The Establishment Frederick antel struggled never to get POS pu up Arnold Noak also Al got a job briefly in my university in Leeds Helen Rosen out waited almost 30 years to get a post and was never respected by the people in Manchester from the research that I've done so this is a crucial thing for people to understand and to take back into their teaching what was the effect of this precise moment and the why did it disappear so when volheim talks about the group of German pea
king Scholars like sorry I have to say this one um okay here pevner saxel yannes vilder Edgard Vin Rudolph vitg you've all probably heard of them right if you're anybody in any historical you know about them and they brought to Britain the intellectual sophistication they forced it to come of age but in that category there are no women not a single woman intellectualism whereas here's just a few of them he could have mentioned not all of them come to Britain but Ava movitz who is the one I menti
oned Stella crish I've mentioned Erica TI conrat margarit bber George these are all available figures who are part of this immigration that have changed the history of Art and I am pretty sure and this is why I'm so passionate about it that come a few years down the line I and my generation will be as untaught as un forgotten in the introductory courses of the history of art there will be you can do a feminist course you can do some feminist stuff but we will not be integrated into the history o
f the intellectual history of art history so my final point was how can I show transgeneration feminist Fidelity and I finally in the book saw correspondence between Julia Crista who's been a Guiding Light in my work about the idea of temporalities of generations and this idea of this hinge between bodies and meaning between passion and the sign these are exactly the same things articulated through psych analysis and literary Theory but also instead of a sociology of knowledge or beside it there
is also we need Fuko we need an archaeology of knowledge we need this critical understanding of the formation of the discourses uh the the rules of formation so women's time is a we can explain it to bit more but when Michel Fuko says Archaeology is a comparative analysis that's not intended to reduce the diversity of discourses and to outline the unity that totalizes them but to divide up their diversity into different figures now that is crucial for us trying to not end up with a thing that I
do a bit of queer art history or I do postcolonial or I have to decolonize or maybe I do gender or may I do women these figures are the figures of the absolutely compacted sets of social constructions so we have class race gender sexuality we've broken them up but if we see them as entangled figures which are articulated all the time in different ways in the works of art often with exclusions often with for Grants we have the purpose of not having a unifying but a diversifying effect but not in
this now labeling we must get away from this IDE identity charact categories we have to have a form of understanding the these structural which is why I use Edward gon's word I don't like intersectionality but the entanglement which requires consistent decipherment but we decipher it through ART because art is already enacting these in or formulating them in this and ways so on that basis I wish to thank you for your incredible patience and attention and on its eth th anniversary I am so thrill
ed to say that the melon said [Applause] yes thank you very much I'm very sorry I've left you no time to argue with me so you want your drink but we can have polite questions here and arguments over drinks and Chris but I think we will we'll have some time for some some conversation out because there's so much and I love that um idea of entanglement because entanglement across forms across generations and and doing that work actually I was just thinking as we sat here in Bloomsbury as well the t
he the social spaces in which these ideas are shaped in institutions through publishing and Publishing houses and actually the work of taking a book and seeing it you know not just the work of a sole author but as a crucible of intellectual shape and intellectual history I felt it kind of opening up as we were leafing through its its pages but that each page contains a kind of deep sort of djok canology or archaeology and like those metaphors of digging deep and rising up so that just for me I f
elt as we were watching and listening with you we were kind of doing that deep work of excavation well it was it was very much like that because Adrian R kept saying to me just get on with it just finish this book you know how how can it take you know 10 years to think about it or five years to write it and you think I didn't understand it because nothing in my art history background even even in terms of my feminist gave me the tools to see what this 19th century and early 20th Century thing so
I I you know and I some people who know me in particularly Franchesco from from from working with me you know this moment where we the people who weren't included in the warberg circle began to be interested in vook right and there's this wonderful thing about um Adrian writes about the difference between Ving in VOR and Ving in the verog you know this how the translation of this thing that with the these changes Etc but nothing when I was at the courtold would have made me go to the to the vog
Institute it didn't make any sense because we were being brought up in a completely formalist you know educated in that particular model and then slowly I've done it myself like a kind of autodidact you know running along behind people thinking have I quite got it do I quite understand this then when I met casir I thought oh no I'm going to lie down in my you know bedroom fluence I can't do this I can't do this Adrian I don't understand just get on with it just get on with it but that work was
been so rewarding to see exactly the archaeology of trying to plot out and I know other people can do more with this or plot out in different way but my main thing was to not just have her as a curiosity right but that moment when I decided to put her in that Dreamland of humanist I thought that's it we've got to insert women's thinking into this normalized Pantheon and and if we don't shift that people people will keep repeating it and women will always be additional not co-creators of the thes
e intellectual debates and and indeed contesters or you know adding New Concepts yeah and I think also for your talk as well it took me it made me think about what's happened the losses of the professionalization of art history uh perhaps losing something of this paracity these conver intellectual conversations with sociologists or and and somehow perhaps in a kind of a professionalization and a defining something that we can sell to you know students to come study with us or you know to kind of
protect it and create it we've lost something of the kind of messy paracity and dialogue which happens in that sort of that intellectual ferment that you were kind of for me mapping out but that's also the crucial thing about understanding which J J sellner's work um and and I'm sorry moment loss of the other U co-author with him but it was in the PowerPoint um that Manheim was reading Regal and I thought I'm you know one of my colleagues keeps teaching Regal I thought oh God I know these one o
f these old men that I don't know about and I thought oh Lord another big Luna okay so why is one of the great art historians at the founding of art history writing this book about late Roman art with this concept of the belt on showing why do we find consistencies across all sorts of material forms in a culture from its highest form to its lowest form of throwaway Pottery sharing something right now that's the thing so we can't just to say it's all the style because that was the Verlin it's a b
it thin oh they all have the St and they copied that's where you need something more than a mentality so the first thing that Manheim writes is a critique of Regal CU they're all reading the art historians so it's not a kind of messy paracity excuse me saying that it's it's a quite it's an intellectual transdisciplinarity because you can't you have to think Society you have to think the text you have to think the image you have to think the subject you have to think how thinking thinks you have
to think how images formulate and you can't do art history if you don't teach people that they are going to have to Eng engage with this if you narrow history down you are only going to serve the market or the people who the only thing you can collect is an object or a name they can't collect what the art the work that art does I can already see some questions so I'm going to just hand my mic here to Lynn oh Lyn hello um G Zelda thank you so much and congratulations to you and to everyone at the
PMC on a really stunning book I mean at on every level and in every sense of the word it it's stunning but it's left me in a real mess oh dear because I'm full of what ifs you know what if uh that tradition um of the sort of hermeneutics of the image the historical and sociological anthropological hermeneutics of the the image had been the one that won out where would history of art been or where would art history be now which left me thinking are we say are you saying that the social history o
f art as it took shape in Britain and America and elsewhere in Europe has that been complicit as well in just kind of you know burying a a kind of theoretical philosophical tradition of thinking about the image that can also be political so you know my you know my first that's a question and then an observation is how important it is to say again and again that this was happening before 1970 although there are great histories of post 1970 and of course women in Revolt is a brilliant example of t
hat the exhibition at Tate Britain it was happening before and we shouldn't you know olude those histories because it's not a prehistory it's not pre feminism or Proto feminism it's feminism so I don't know I'm sorry I'm in still thinking a lot but um thank you so much I think it's a brilliant book Thank well thank you Lynn very much but can I'm going to stand up going say this because you're sitting things I just say two things relatively quickly about that which is um yes to the the social his
tory of art is complicit right in some degree and not degree so I a social historian of Art and the continuity would lie in um what the social history of the 19 what I gained for instance very simply like what I gained from Reading TJ Clark is it made me read the 18th Brum and then read Marx so I could get hold of this other sociological this this tradition which and historical so you you can't I can't do without that and to some extent Rosenau doesn't do without it she's she's formally because
she's definitely she's not sort of post situationist Marxist like the social history of art of tag and Clark and Nichol Hig had you Nicola sorry a dyslexic person with a Greek name as I'm very apologetic for that being so but of course it was experienced by those of us in the 1970s of the kind of condescension so I got condescension one part from Alan Bess you know you're wasting a perfectly adequate Intelligence on a trivial subject like women on the other hand you couldn't get gender and sexua
lity and any more than you could get issues of race and post into the mix because Marxism is a totalizer so the anti totalists total to totalists hate Marxism but the marxists are totalists they're not going to share the space they give a certain kind of prioritization because this is a single explanation and that's where this um anthropology this tradition of anthropology of thinking symbolic structures with the new kind different kinds of sociology but also in a sense getting back the sense th
at they were at the beginning of the 20th century many of them were aware of other worlds and other histories and other timelines and that's why I keep stressing this archaological thing the surfacing that's shattering the classical Christian entric Western timeline um and also obviously you know the Jewish question of the Jewish timeline that comes all sort of into it so I think there is a complete icity I do think we were closed out and then you get labeled feminist and that I think has been t
he Trap because so that's one thing the second one that you're saying which is yes the great Revelation for me was to find a continuous body of feminist thinking which took the form so let's take Billington Greg as an example she's a suffragette with the paner she thinks violence is not the answer by the 1940s and 50s she's on a range of committees she's talking about how can you Foster the notion of Revolt to pick up your women in revolt revolt isn't just resistance Etc which is this you know u
pheaval and transformation so by the 50s 40s she says we've got to get women into Parliament we got the vote but they're doing nothing right but we got to get women into Parliament as women not because they're tick boox MF but because they're thinking the question and there's a commit thing I a conference I talk about where these women get together so there's you know D Mary stocks there's a whole range of these really important mid2 Century thinkers saying what is it that we could say to people
that having more women doing things could do for people so they investigate are women less criminal so they get all the statistics do women commit less crimes so we could say we're much less violent okay doesn't support it but she goes through all the things and one of the things they conclude is you've got to teach everybody literature and art by women you've got to put in front of everybody examples of women scientists and philosophers and all the rest of it that's going to be change because
not because we're arguing there is a feminine character or something in femininity but there is a historical body of stuff that if you encounter it will change the way people think because it it's not presenting women artists because that's why I I absolutely think we just going to have exhibitions going on for years oh we' rediscovered them again in a whole another ER like the the the mess uh exhibition the director at the Tyson who's a lovely man he's very positive and the feminist love him he
says oh I'm so thrilled there's so many names I've never heard about and I say I think we wrote about this half a century ago you've had 50 bloody years excuse me absolutely say to people excuse me you could begin to think about that and do an exhibition more interestingly then hear some more of them right and here's some more of them and they do motherhood and they do Sisterhood and they do something else what are they doing when you know my interesting thing which is you know what is happenin
g when Arta galeski says are there interesting thing that Caravaggio did to a subject that everybody's talking about what is that doing how would you read it because you're reading these people in conversation with each other and in terms of the counter rol reformation and what's happening in this early 16th century 17th century which is the Great era of colonialization beginning of colonialization and you got to hold those together and you can't do that under a name and do I like her and was sh
e good you know was she interesting it's what it did how are you going to read it so I I think what we got from the 70s which is I'm reaching back to you know Fuko and and semiotics which was the form in which that was thought in the 70s compared to symbolic form and anthropology in the 20s and 30s and I'm more interested in the sense that I I I constantly get people saying even the book before this you know no one will read it because they don't know the theory and they don't know the theory be
cause nobody says to students I'm afraid you're just going to have to read a little bit and try it out and you have to know about how meaning is produced you have to know what subjectivity is you have to know this but now we we're trying to you know teach how to decolonize without any understanding of what colonization is as a system as a discourse as a power structure as a negation of subjectivity as the formation of certain subjectivities so I I use all those words and I thought you know I'm s
ure the students think I don't know what you're talking about I know because but how so that becomes this very pedagogical thing and I think we are now at this anti anti- synthetic anti- totalizing anti-structural thinking the power of positivism in in in in British you know way is the thing we had this tremble in the in the 70s of an intense theorized ation process and it's now something that we you know as you say the professionalization and they take the women artists in but they don't take a
nything else with it right and it's harder and harder for me ever to write anything because you know I I'm just now thinking you know I can write the books I want to write and if I find some Publishers who are prepared to do it but that's good but I'm just depositing something there that maybe in 50 years somebody will say well that was interesting how did they think I don't understand how they put that together but we have to take this on board because otherwise we're drifting into you know as
you all know in University we don't know what it is to teach anybody and we're terrified to teach anything that will cause offense and excuse me this is so dot dot dot dot awful what has happened in the history of of the world we do need to make people feel desperately unhappy more so than they are at the prospect of trump as the President of the United States which is just look well maybe there's I have one question there and then maybe we'll questions yeah and then we'll um make sure sorry um
thank you very much you've really opened my eyes to an enormous knowledge about my mother that I never had but one of the things that her list her holistic perspective um you haven't really mentioned is her interest in athetics and I wonder if you think that that made a a significant difference in her p in in her perspective um yes thank you very much much do two things in one sense when you ask that the interest in Aesthetics there is this whole aesthetic Theory obviously what is it what gives
us pleasure when we look at Art and it's I don't think she's asking those questions in this book um and in one sense her her interest is more in how what we' call Visual structures whether it's an a cathedral or a temple or the synagogue um are the ways in which we give a form to certain things so that's why I've been Str stressing this idea of a form or a formulation the question of traditional Aesthetics is what is the beautiful and what is the nature of the kind of pleasure I get from looking
I don't think she is particularly interested in that but of course anybody who writes about anything in art you are constantly up against the incredible um ways in which those formulations or that thinking takes its material form right and I've been challenged to write about matis and I never got matis I have to feel so ignorant I never got it but by setting myself out to do that I have begun sort of you get to that point you say just you kind of Gran with these how did that happen how did he d
o that so I think all of us get that and we wouldn't study art history in any way un unless this equally fascinated us sense and an exhibition I did recently was called medium and memory which was trying to hold these two ideas in that there's something that someone feels they need to make out about that needs to have a form but it only happens because of the way in which they're um their skill the capacity to compose the use of materials the production of an a something a thing an effect happen
s so I think it's a really important point you've brought up I think she loved it right was interested but she was also deeply intellectually interested in what mo mo I mean so in the ideal city book and in her books on architecture what made people want to imagine something other than the real world make a city beautiful or produce a sort of an ideal so that's a important thing thank you for for raising that mic I want to give you time to have conversation to look at the book as well I think we
have copies um on display next door um so I hope you'll all be able to stay around to have a drink to ask resel early questions and to kind of process all these amazing ideas about the intellectual histories and the shape of art history what was and what might have been and Ponder on that but before we kind of break and go into a more informal uh session over drinks I want to thank you all for coming to be part of this conversation um both in the room and online um but also to say thank you so
much to gisala for your collaboration with us all the conversations that have shaped this book have been a real joy and a a creative Endeavor for us which is not only about making a book but again these bigger questions about what is it we're doing in in publishing and supporting something called at the Paul melon Center for studies in British art and thinking about the shape of the history of Art in Britain in what I hope is a complex creative and and challenging way that's in conversation with
you and everyone in this room and particularly Helen Rosen now so let's um say thank you to grala and then we'll go [Applause] next
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