H. W.

Janson
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Horst Waldemar Janson (October 4, 1913 September 30, 1982), who published as H. W.
Janson, was a Russian-born Baltic German-American professor of art history best known for his
History of Art, which was first published in 1962 and has sold more than two million copies in
fifteen languages.
Contents [hide]
1
Early Life and Education
2
Academic career
3
Feminist Critiques
4
References and sources
5
External links
Early Life and Education[edit]
Janson was born in St. Petersburg in 1913 to Friedrich Janson (18751927) and Helene Porsch
(Janson) (18791974), a Lutheran family of Baltic German stock.[1][2] 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 (193638) and the University of
Iowa School of Art and Art History (193841) while pursuing his degree. In 1941 he married
Dora Jane Heineberg (19162002), an art history student at Radcliffe College, and he became a
citizen in 1943.
Academic career[edit]
Janson taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1941 until 1949, when he joined the
faculty of New York University, where he developed the undergraduate arts department and
taught at the graduate Institute of Fine Arts. 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 prizewinning 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 EastWest dialogue in
the arts. Over his career, Janson consulted on the TimeLife 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.[3]
Feminist Critiques[edit]
Despite or perhaps because of the popularity and influence of History of Art, it came under
increased scrutiny by art historians, who sought a more inclusive story of Western art. According
to feminist art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard: "Women artists in the 1950s and
1960s suffered professional isolation not only from one another, but also from their own history,
in an era when women artists of the past had been virtually written out of the history of art, H.W.

Janson's influential textbook, History of Art, first published in 1962, contained neither the name
nor the work of a single woman artist. In thus excluding women from the history of art (...)."[4]