Janson, H[orst] W[oldemar] known as "Peter"

Date born: 1913

Place born: St Petersburg, Russia

Date died: 1982

Place died: (train between Zurich and Milan)

Chairman and professor of the department of art, New York University, 1949-1979; wrote the famous survey of art history. Janson was born to Friedrich Janson (1875-1927) and Helene Porsch (Janson) (1879-1974). His parents were of Swedish extraction living in Russia. The family moved to Hamburg after the Russian Revolution, where Janson graduated from the Wilhelms Gymnasium in 1932. He studied at Munich and then at the new art history program at the university in Hamburg where he was a student of Erwin Panofsky. He was a part of the so-called Hamburg school of art history whose other students included William Heckscher, Lotte Brand Philip, and Klaus Hinrichsen (b. 1927) and Liselotte Müller. In 1935, at the suggestion of Panofsky, who had fled Germany in 1933 for the United States, Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sponsored Janson as an immigrant to the United States where he had been awarded a Charles Holtzer fellowship at Harvard University. Janson studied at Harvard between 1935-1942 under Chandler R. Post and Paul J. Sachs. He became close and lifelong friends with fellow Harvard art-history student Syndey J. Freedberg. Janson worked at the Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA, 1938, while pursuing his graduate degree and then at the University of Iowa, 1938-41. According to his son, Anthony, Janson drew the ire of the chairman of the Iowa department of art, the painter Grant Wood, for taking art students to see a Picasso show in Chicago. In 1941 he was appointed assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. His Ph.D. was awarded from Harvard in 1942 on the subject of Michelozzo. His family remained in Germany during World War II, where his brother, fighting for the Nazis, was killed in 1943. Janson married Dora Heineberg, an art-history undergraduate at Radcliffe, in 1941. During World War II, when many universities had been converted to soldier training camps, Janson lectured on physics and Russian to American soldiers in St Louis. He became a citizen in 1943. In 1946 he was appointed associate professor of art history. In 1949 he was appointed professor and chairman of the department of art at New York University. He remained chair for twenty-five years, developing the undergraduate (Washington Square) program into one of the finest in the nation. He was adjunct faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts, the graduate program at NYU, though frictions developed between the graduate faculty and Janson. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 1952-53. That same year he published Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, for which he was a recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Prize from the College Art Association. In 1957, his book on Donatello appeared, which was again awarded a Morey Prize from the CAA. In 1959, Janson published a book of plates of the monuments of art history, titled Key Monuments of the History of Art, to aid his undergraduates in their student of art. In 1963, Janson and his wife, Dora, followed this by publishing their History of Art. It grew over the years to be the best-selling textbook of any subject in the United States and, known simply as "Janson," was for years was the standard text. Because Janson's appointment at NYU was primarily at the undergraduate level, he had fewer Ph.D. students than others of his profile. His students (at Washington University) included Irving Lavin and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.

Janson's work, especially his Ape lore book, show the influence of the Hamburg school/Warburg influence. The book focuses on the history of art or styles as much as it does mythological phenomenon and its manifestation in material culture. Janson 1962 History of Art was an instant best seller, contrasting it from the other predominant art-history text, Art Through the Ages by Helen Gardner, which by its numerous posthumous revisions treated art as a history of styles. Janson's book came under criticism in later years for its lack of inclusion of women artists. Subsequent editions written by his son, Anthony Janson (b. 1943), changed this. LS

Home Country: Germany/United States

Sources: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 65, cited; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 543; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 332-8; Janson, Anthony. "Janson, Horst Woldemar" American National Biography; [obituary:] White, John. "H W Janson." The Burlington Magazine 125, no. 961. (April 1983): 226; Russell, John. "Prof. H.W. Janson Is Dead at 68, Wrote Best-Selling 'History of Art'." New York Times October 3, 1982, p. 44.

Bibliography: [complete bibliography:] "Bibliography of H. W. Janson" in, Barasch, Moshe, and Sandler,Lucy Freeman eds. Art, the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson. New York: H. N. Abrams/Prentice-Hall, 1981, pp. 805-812; Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952; "The Myth of the Avant-Garde." in, Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Essays in Memory of Milton S. Fox: New York: Abrams, 1975, pp. 167-75; and Rosenblum, Robert. 19th Century Art. New York: Abrams, 1984; and Janson, Dora, and Kerman, Joseph. A History of Art & Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968; Form Follows Function - or Does It? Modernist Design Theory and the History of Art. Maarssen, The Netherlands: Gary Schwartz, 1982; and Cauman, Samuel. History of Art for Young People. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1971; Key Monuments of the History of Art: a Visual Survey. Englewood Cliffs, NjJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959; and Herschman, Judith. An Iconographic Index to Stanislas Lami’s Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l’Ecole française au dix-neuvième siècle. New York: Garland 1983; and Janson, Dora Jane. History of Art: a Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day. New York: Abrams, 1963.

Subject's name: H. W. Janson