H. W. Janson
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Horst Waldemar Janson (October 4, 1913 – September 30, 1982), was a Russian-born German-American professor of art history best known for his History of Art, which was first published in 1962 and has since sold more than four million copies in fifteen languages.
Early life and education
Janson was born in St. Petersburg in 1913 to Friedrich Janson (1875–1927) and Helene Porsch (Janson) (1879–1974), a Lutheran family of Baltic German stock. After the October Revolution, the family moved to Finland and then Hamburg, where Janson attended the Wilhelms Gymnasium (graduated 1932).
After his German Abitur, Janson studied at the University of Munich and then at the art history program at the University of Hamburg, where he was a student of Erwin Panofsky. In 1935, at the suggestion of Panofsky, who had emigrated to the United States, Alfred Barr sponsored Janson as an immigrant, and he completed a PhD at Harvard University in 1942 (his dissertation was on Michelozzo). He taught at the Worcester Art Museum (1936–38) and the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History (1938–41) while pursuing his degree. In 1941 he married Dora Jane Heineberg (1916–2002), an art history student at Radcliffe College who later collaborated with him as co-author, and he became a citizen in 1943.
Academic career
Janson taught at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University from 1941 until 1948, where he also took charge of a renewal of the University Art Gallery collection (now known as the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum). Janson's plan to sell popular canvases such as Frederic Remington's A Dash for the Timber at the New York galleries of the Kende family drew comment from the local paper, wondering why St. Louisans had not been given preference. Janson sold 120 artworks, retained 80, and acquired 40 works by European modernists through the Kende Galleries: Paul Klee, Juan Gris, Theo van Doesburg.
Janson left in 1948 to join the faculty of New York University, where he developed the undergraduate arts department and taught at the graduate Institute of Fine Arts. Also in 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was recognized with an honorary degree in 1981, and died on a train between Zurich and Milan in 1982 at the age of 68.
He wrote about Renaissance art and nineteenth-century sculpture, and authored two prize-winning books, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1952) and Sculpture of Donatello (1957). In his later years he was concerned with East–West dialogue in the arts. Over his career, Janson consulted on the Time–Life Library of Art; was president of the College Art Association, editor of the Art Bulletin, and founding member and President of the Renaissance Society of America. He also wrote books on art for young people, some in collaboration with his wife.
Janson's signature contribution to the discipline of art history, specifically to the teaching of art history, is his survey text entitled simply History of Art, which was first published in 1962 and has since become the standard by which current art history textbooks are measured.
Pages linking in as of Dec 2021
Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Achelous and Hercules, Aldwyth, Anton Dominik Fernkorn, Antonio Rossellino, Auguste Rodin, Augustus of Prima Porta, Barbarian, Bollingen Foundation, Cedric Wright, Charioteer of Delphi, Constructivism (art), Contrapposto, Cultural Bolshevism, Death mask, Dora Jane Janson, Dying Gaul, Gary Schwartz (art historian), George Stubbs, Hamburg School of Art History, Hippolyte Moulin, Honoré Daumier, Horst Janson, I and the Village, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, Idelle Weber, Irving Lavin, Jacques-Louis David, Jericho, Joanne Leonard, Joseph the Carpenter, Kathy Grove, Kay WalkingStick, Kinetic art, Kritios Boy, Las Meninas, Last Judgment, Lawrence Kupferman, Lotte Brand Philip, Michelle Facos, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, National Book Award for Nonfiction, New York University Institute of Fine Arts, Nicolas Poussin, Paul Ryan (video artist), Portfolio Magazine, Poussinists and Rubenists, Robert Rosenblum, St. Louis School of Fine Arts, Tatlin's Tower, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage Studios), Tell es-Sultan, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, The Nightmare, The Return of the Prodigal Son (Rembrandt), Tomb of Antipope John XXIII, University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, Vladimir Tatlin, Wilhelm-Gymnasium, William S. Heckscher, Winged Victory of Samothrace
