Griselda Pollock (born 1949) is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. Since 1977, Pollock has been one of the most influential scholars of modern, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is also a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history and gender studies.
Born in South Africa, Griselda Pollock grew up in both French and English Canada. Moving to Britain during her teens, Pollock studied Modern History at Oxford (1967-1970) and History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1970-72). She received her doctorate in 1980 for a study of Vincent Van Gogh and Dutch Art: A reading of his notions of the modern. After teaching at Reading and Manchester universities, Pollock went to Leeds in 1977 as Lecturer in History of Art and Film and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Social and Critical Histories of Art in 1990. In 2001 she became Director of Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, where she is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art.
Griselda Pollock continually challenges the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so excluding of women's artistic contributions, and articulates the complex relations between femininity, modernity, psychoanalysis and representation. Pollock is engaged in French feminism and psychoanalysis. She is best known for her work on the artists Jean-François Millet, Vincent van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, Bracha L. Ettinger, Eva Hesse and Charlotte Salomon.
(& Fred Orton) Vincent van Gogh: Artist of his Time, Phaidon Press, Oxford, 1978; US-edition: E. P. Dutton ISBN 0714818836
edited and re-published in: Orton & Pollock 1996, pp. 3-51
(& Fred Orton) Les Données Bretonnantes: La Prairie de Représentation, in: Art History III/3, 1980, pp. 314—344
re-published in: Orton & Pollock 1996, pp. 53-88
Mary Cassatt, London Jupiter Books, 1980
Artists mythologies and media genius, madness and art history, in: Screen XXI/3, 1980, pp. 57—96
Vincent van Gogh in zijn Hollandse jaren: Kijk op stad en land door Van Gogh en zijn tijdgenoten 1870-1890, exh. cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, 1980/1981 (no ISBN)
Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology, London Routledge & Kegan (Griselda Pollock with Rozsika Parker), 1981.
(& Fred Orton) Cloisonism?, in: Art History V/3, 1982, pp. 341—348
re-published in: Orton & Pollock 1996, pp. 115-124
The Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff, London Virago ( newly introduced with Rozsika Parker), 1985.
Framing Feminism: Art & the Women’ s Movement 1970-85, (Griselda Pollock with Rozsika Parker) 1987.
Vision and Difference: [Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art], London Routledge and New York Methuen, 1987.
'Inscriptions in the Feminine'. In Catherine de Zegher (ed), Inside the Visible. MIT, 1996. 67-87.
Agency and the Avant-Garde: Studies in Authorship and History by Way of Van Gogh, in Block 1989/15, pp. 5—15
re-published in: Orton & Pollock 1996, pp. 315-342
"Oeuvres Autistes." In: Versus 3 1994.
Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision (co-edited Richard Kendall). London Pandora Books, 1992, (now Rivers Oram Press, London.
Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History, London Thames and Hudson, 1993.
Trouble in the Archives. Special Issue Differences vol. 4 no. 3, 1992.
Generations and Geographies: Critical Theories and Critical Practices in Feminism and the Visual Arts, ed. Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0-415-14128-1
(& Fred Orton) Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, Manchester University Press, 1996 ISBN 0719043980
The Ambivalence of Pleasure, Getty Art History Oral Documentation Project, interview by Richard Cándida Smith, Getty Research Institute, 1997.
Mary Cassatt Painter of Modern Women, London Thames & Hudson: World of Art, 1998.
On not seeing Provence: Van Gogh and the landscape of consolation, 1888-1889, in: Framing France: The representation of landscape in France, 1870-1914, ed. Richard Thomson, Manchester University Press 1998, pp. 81—118 ISBN 0719049350
Aesthetics. Politics. Ethics Julia Kristeva 1966-96, Special Issue Guest Edited parallax, no. 8, 1998.
Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Histories of Art, London, Routledge, 1999.
Looking Back to the Future: Essays by Griselda Pollock from the 1990s, New York, G&B New Arts, introduced by Penny Florence, 2000. ISBN 90-5701-132-8
Work and the Image, 2 vols. Edited By Griselda Pollock with Valerie Mainz, London:Ashgate Press, 2000.
Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art ( Chapter 1: Feminist interventions in the histories of art: an introduction, Chapter 3: Modernity and the spaces of feminity), Routledge Classics, 2003.
Psychoanalysis and the Image. (ed). Boston and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. ISBN 1-4051-3461-5
A very long engagement : singularity and difference in the critical writing on Eva Hesse in Encountering Eva Hesse, edited by Griselda Pollock with Vanessa Corby, London and Munich: Prestel, 2006.
Museums after Modernism, edited by Griselda Pollock with Joyce Zemans Boston: Blackwells, 2007.
Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum Time, Space and the Archive, London: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 978-0-415-41374-9
The Sacred and the Feminine, edited by Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron. London I.B. Tauris, 2008.
