White Hat/Black Hat 

Frances Richard

Helen Gardner’s benevolently dictatorial Art through the Ages was published in 1926, and remained the pre-eminent survey for American undergraduates until 1962, when H.W. Janson’s History of Art joined it on introductory syllabuses. Now in its 12th edition, Gardner has been revised and updated without its pantheon of geniuses being much dislodged, while Janson, in its seventh edition, makes more concessions to newfangled notions like feminism and deconstruction. But both are encyclopedic tomes in which neophytes will find the chronology of stylistic periods unfolding like the geological record: Triassic to Jurassic to Cretaceous; Impressionism to Post-Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism to Futurism to Constructivism to Expressionism to Dada to Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism to Pop to Conceptualism. Students might wonder at this perfect taxonomy, or at the one or two textbook chapters that purport to summarise the art of Africa, India, China, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific and Paleolithic humans before getting back to Athens and Rome, to Florence, Bruges, Paris and New York. If the class is labelled ‘Art since 1945’, the teleological march will begin in medias res: aesthetic concerns and world-historical events predating the war will be lost in the primordial soup and only a few giant patriarchs will remain: Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian – and Duchamp perhaps. The survey will end in a hodgepodge of examples tautologically labelled ‘contemporary’.

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