Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: An Introduction to its History and Significance was first published in 1926 in a stout pocketbook with four colour plates and a thirty chapters organised by time and place. In 2020, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History by Fred S. Kleiner appeared in its 16th edition in print (hardback: $300.95) and as a paywalled e-book. (Pearson recently announced the 17th edition, with four new authors, for 2027). H. W. Janson and Dora Jane Janson’s History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day (1962) has gone through a similar transformation.
Now in its 8th edition, revised by a team of authors, it has evolved into Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition (2010). In successive editions, Gardner’s and Jansons’ words have been reframed and revised, often beyond recognition, as their primary authors metamorphosed into brands. Meanwhile, publishers enhanced the printed editions first with CD-ROMs, and later in re-versioned digital incarnations accessorised with revision aids. Positioned as core texts for art history survey courses, they dominated the North American market until the arrival of Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History (1995 and subsequent editions) and, more recently, The History of Art: A Global View by Jean Robertson, Deborah Hutton and ten other authors (2022).
This talk begins by tracing the publication histories of Gardner and Janson from their first editions to their current e-book incarnations, and sketching out (via an unscientific sample) how they have, and have not, been deployed in North American and British universities. Touching on the rather different readership for which classic surveys by Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark were written, it considers the role played by these publications in shaping art history in the pre-internet era. What are the implications of the survey set-text for the trajectories of art history in pro-textbook North America vs the textbook-avoidant UK? What do these volumes in their print and digital incarnations reveal about changing educational methods and priorities, the forces exerted by the publishing industry, and the variable fortunes of art history in Anglophone tertiary education?