The article sure to get everyone's attention this morning comes from the New York Times: Janson's History of Art, cause of back problems in generations of undergraduates, has been revised by a new team of scholars:
The result, at more than 1,100 pages and 1,450 illustrations, will undoubtedly surprise many Janson loyalists, especially instructors who have taught from the book so long they can almost do so without cracking it open. The new edition drops not only Whistler's portrait of his mother but also evicts several other longtime residents, like Domenichino, the Baroque master, and Louis Le Nain, whose work is in the Louvre.
The sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac, for example, has been erased with a vengeance; even a portrait by another artist of Roubiliac posing with his work has been dropped. And some full-page reproductions that had become permanent fixtures — like the Metropolitan Museum of Art's van Eyck diptych, "The Crucifixion, the Last Judgment" — have been replaced with others seen to be more representative of an artist's work.
Although the publisher has now incorporated the name "Janson" into the title, the new edition, the seventh, is the first to have no Janson associated with it. H. W. Janson died in 1982, and his son, Anthony F. Janson, who took over and revised it several times, retired as the book's guiding light in 2002.
Sarah Touborg, the current editor, said about a quarter of the contents had been changed. "To have done less than that would have been tough, given our vision of renovating Janson," she said. "And doing more than that would have risked losing our very loyal base of customers."
I didn't use Janson as a student - we had the equally weighty Gardner's Art Through the Ages - though I did as a teaching assistant for the introductory art history class when in grad school. Due in part to the poor design of that class - the department, for reasons obscure to me now, tried to cram the entire 'Pyramids to Picasso' experience into a single, often team-taught, semester, which just did not work - we didn't rely on Janson much. So I don't have any real feelings about the book. But why let that stop the fun? Let the games begin!
Drop Whistler's mother? Fine with me. I like its replacement better, and it arguably involves more of the various aspects of his art than dear old mom. The other changes mentioned I'm not so sure about. I first learned to love baroque art through my early art history classes, so messing with it makes me uneasy. I'm especially surprised to see Le Nain dropped - not that I ever was such a fan or him or his brothers, but I would have thought that in light of aspects of the revision - using art "as a way to discuss race, class, and gender" - he would have been useful.
Of course, that agenda is sure to inspire criticism. Me, I'll wait until I see it, but must admit I'm of two minds at the moment. Let me just say that as important and justified as it is to discuss race, class, and gender, it's also important not to be dreary and didactic. One never expects much from a textbook, but given that art history remains a subject that, while not without its pains, holds real pleasures, one hopes that the new authors kept that in mind.
My first art history class - part one of the basic survey, prehistory to Gothic - may be said to have changed my life, so I've an interest in the different ways the course gets done. At the same time, the canon anxiety that accompanies a revision of such a basic text always seems like an overreaction to me. We have other ways of maintaining our traditions and histories of art, after all, and what gets dimly impressed on sleepy young minds is hardly the most important one. Perhaps this is on my mind because I finally caught the MFA's very uneven Modern Masters: Degas to Picasso (about which, more later), but the permanent collections of our museums extend far beyond what we see installed on the walls. Museum storerooms are deep places, holding more of the past than a superficial survey course could ever encompass. Nothing is ever lost? Not quite, perhaps, but many of the byways of past art remain hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.
A final suggestion, or provocation: one of the pressures of doing a book like Janson's is the limited space. However expansive (and expensive!) the book may be, no one will be completely satisfied - hence the sort of battles the article describes. So I propose that surveys of this kind drop contemporary art altogether - that they stop chronologically at, say, the second world war, or somewhere around there that makes a convenient ending in art historical terms. That would free up some precious pages and get rid of an area that a book of this kind is ill-equipped to serve. No one uses it anyway: art history surveys inevitably end with a mad dash by the professor to get through the late nineteenth century in order to reach Cézanne, or Cubism at best. Courses on contemporary art, or even modern and contemporary both, would never use such a broad text as Janson. Including much twentieth century art (and beyond) only serves the illusion of being comprehensive. Since we know that isn't the case - by virtue of all the choices made as to what's included along the way, if nothing else - why not give it up and concentrate on doing what the book does best?
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