Ada Polak

Who was Ada Polak?

Ada Buch Polak was a Norwegian art historian.

She was born in Ljan as a son of engineer Harald Buch and teacher Camilla Collett. She was a great-granddaughter of writer Camilla Collett and Peter Jonas Collett, grandniece of Robert and Alf Collett. She finished her secondary education in 1933 and graduated from the University of Oslo in 1940 with the thesis Norsk Glass 1739–1753, and continued working with glass to take her doctorate in 1953 on the thesis Gammelt norsk glass.

She spent half a year as an associate professor at the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, and was then a curator at Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum from 1942 to 1948. In July 1948 she married British solicitor Alfred Laurence Polak, and moved to London. Her sister Ellisiv married Sverre Steen.

Polak spent the rest of her career as a freelance writer, in books, journals and yearbooks, magazines and newspapers. She was on a state scholarship since the early 1980s. She was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and was decorated as a Knight, First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 1981, and died in October 2010 in London.