Wilmingon, North Carolina -- If you studied art history in the 1960s or 1970s, you probably think of your first textbook in the subject simply as “Janson.”
Formally known as History of Art, by H.W. Janson, it was the staple of introductory art-history courses at the time. Scholars practicing the discipline today are likely to have cut their teeth on the first or second edition. “For many people, it is perhaps their only art-history reference,” says Patricia G. Berman, associate professor of art history at Wellesley College. “On the reference shelf they have their dictionary, their book of baseball stats, and Janson.”
Although its sales have been eclipsed over the last 10 years by another perennial favorite, R.H. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich), Janson is still the standard in many people’s minds.
The fifth edition of this venerable textbook was released this spring, revised by Anthony F. Janson, the author’s son, who is a visiting professor of art history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
The latest edition is heavy -- at 960 pages, it weighs in at just over eight pounds -- and beautifully illustrated, with more than 1,200 pictures, more than half of them in color. It is also something of a milestone, because it marks the first time that Anthony Janson -- who took over the next edition after his father died in 1982 -- has, as he puts it, “laid my hand to the text.”
He had not meant to make major changes, he says. But “once I started, I thought, ‘Gosh, there’s a gap here,’ or, ‘How is a new reader going to understand this or that?’”
Although he tinkered with Aegean art and rearranged Byzantine, his major changes were in the period 1520 to 1760 -- Mannerism through Rococo -- and in 20th-century art.
In the section on Mannerism, Anthony Janson included new paintings by such artists as Giorgio Vasari and Agnolo Bronzino and added new artists, including a woman, Sofonisba Anguissola.
“My goal was to extend the discussion of the rise of major women artists back into the 16th century,” he says. (Past editions did not mention women artists until discussing the 17th century.) Before then, although there were women artists, “we don’t know enough about them to be able to say they are anything more than an occasional factor,” he says.
Anguissola was chosen as a good representative of those artists because she was widely recognized in her own lifetime and spent 20 years as a court painter in Madrid, he says.
Mr. Janson revamped the book’s treatment of 20th-century art in an effort to “flesh out” the discussion, particularly in the areas of sculpture and architecture, and to create “a less monolithic view of their development,” he says.
“The point is to show that the development of 20th-century art was not necessarily a linear development, but came from diverse tendencies, which have complicated interrelationships,” he says. He also “significantly increased” the number of African-American artists discussed, including the contemporary sculptors Martin Puryear, Tyrone Mitchell, and Melvin Edwards.
The choice of contemporary artists is always difficult and largely personal, Mr. Janson says. He included artists to whom he responded “strongly, even negatively,” he says. “I asked myself, ‘Who are the artists who have made an impact on me?’ If they got a rise out of me, they must be worth writing about.”
H.W. Janson, who was a professor of fine arts at New York University from 1949 until his death in 1982, proposed an art-history textbook to his publisher, Harry N. Abrams Inc., in 1956. The undisputed leader in the textbook market at the time was Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, first published in 1926. H.W. Janson’s “basic motivation,” says his son, “was to see if he could build a better mousetrap.”
The first edition of Janson came out in 1962 and was “successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams,” says Anthony Janson. The first edition sold more than a million copies and was translated into 11 languages.
Janson led the art-history textbook market until the 1980s, when Harcourt, Brace hired a team of scholars to extensively revamp Gardner, according to Julia Moore, director of textbook publishing at Abrams. Gardner now dominates the market, she says, followed by Janson and Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, by Frederick Hartt.
The first Janson effort was not intended solely as a text. “It was originally written for anyone to buy -- the average person who had a year or two of college and some nascent interest in art,” says Anthony Janson. It is one of the few textbooks that has a shelf life in popular bookstores. The fourth edition, published in 1991, sold 21,000 copies the first year and an average of 11,000 copies a year in the past four years. The new, fifth edition has sold more than 13,000 copies since its March release.
H.W. Janson’s approach to the study of art history was “formalist,” his son says. “It is concerned first with the history of artistic styles -- how they evolve. The other considerations, of meaning and cultural history, are generally secondary to that delineation.”
Although he follows basically the same approach, Anthony Janson describes himself as “more intuitive” than his father. Their tastes in art often reflected those differences. His father liked the Renaissance, he says, but “I tend to like the art of Mannerism -- pseudo-Rococo particularly -- much more than he did.” He also likes French Romantic painting and 19th- and 20th-century American art more than his father did.
Anthony Janson began working on the book only six weeks after his father’s death, from lung cancer. He was well qualified, having received his master’s degree in art history from New York University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Nevertheless, “my assumption was that the book would be turned over to an older, well-known scholar, for the name value if nothing else,” he says.
But the book had not been revised for a while, and the editors were eager to move quickly. “I didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Janson recalls. “I said, ‘Give me six to eight months to come to terms with my father’s demise.’” Abrams officials told him they could not wait that long.
Mr. Janson says he finally agreed to do the book after realizing that his father would have encouraged him to do the job. “He would have said, ‘Suck it up, my boy, and get it done.’”
Mr. Janson often refers to such internal dialogues with his father. He says that in the third edition (1985) -- his first -- “I did some things he would disapprove of, and I could hear the arguments. I would sit there and argue both sides of the fence, to make sure I could justify it in my own mind.”
Despite the continuing popularity of the Janson and Gardner books, art-history faculty members say they have found no single text that satisfies all of their needs. This is in part because the discipline itself has changed so much over the last decade.
“When I studied art history, Janson was the book, and art history was one discipline and a straightforward one,” says Wellesley’s Ms. Berman. “Now there are so many different ways of approaching the history of art and so many histories of art, it is hard to say that there is one book any more.”
Teachers and scholars are moving away from the traditional chronological approach and toward thematic or contextual approaches to art history. The emphasis on “high art” -- painting, sculpture, and architecture -- has given way to consideration of a wider variety of media, including photography, film, and textiles.
In addition, despite chapters devoted to such non-European art as Islamic and ancient Egyptian, books like Janson tend to be largely “Eurocentric,” scholars say.
“I would like it better if it had more non-Western art and more women,” says Marian J. Hollinger, an assistant professor of art at West Virginia University. She uses Janson, though, “because for the basic art-history survey for our undergraduate students, it still combines probably the most comprehensive general view of Western art.”
Textbook authors have made efforts to broaden and diversify their treatment. The newest edition of Janson, for example, includes additional women artists -- from Anguissola to such contemporary artists as Mildred Howard, Annette Lemieux, Susan Rothenberg, and Kay Walkingstick. There are also new sections on African-American painting and sculpture.
Such efforts are relatively recent. Women and black artists first appeared in Janson in the third edition (1985). The second edition -- the last produced by H.W. Janson -- had none. Even artists who are now well accepted, such as Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, were absent.
Anthony Janson points out that this was the norm for art-history texts at the time. If you added artists, you had to take others out -- or so the argument went, he says. “If you’re going to include Cassatt, for example, plenty of people might argue she was not as great as [Edgar] Degas. If you put her in, you have to take out a work by Degas -- which I did. Can you justify that?”
Faculty members who use Janson’s History of Art in their introductory courses say they like the changes in the latest edition. Jane Kristof, a professor of art at Portland State University who is using the book in a summer course on the history of Western art, says she appreciates the addition of primary-source readings -- selections from Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts, for example, or from Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo.
Faculty members also praise the book’s style and clarity. “I’ve found the Janson is extremely popular with students, largely due to its organization,” says Elizabeth A. Newsome, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. “It’s also very readable.”
And while some who use Janson say they actually prefer the text in Gardner, most agree that nothing matches Janson’s visual appeal -- its attractive design and expensive color reproductions. “In an introductory course, there has to be an element of seduction to engage students, so that they fall in love with a work of art,” says Ms. Newsome. “I think the Janson really does have that element.”
Despite Janson’s immense popularity and staying power, Anthony Janson receives only a small portion of the proceeds from the book. As a result, he has supported himself through other jobs, sandwiching in his work on the book. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and at the College of Charleston. He was senior curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art for five years.
His specialties are Northern Baroque and 19th-century American art, “but basically I’m a generalist,” he says. At the university here, he teaches Baroque painting, medieval art, and, not unnaturally, a survey course on Western European and American art.
He says he is not doing the book for the money, in any event. History of Art is a labor of love, he says, and, more important, a “form of service.”
“I want to make the history of art intelligible and accessible and meaningful to readers,” says Mr. Janson, “so that when they stand in front of a work of art, it comes alive for them.”