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Tip
Sheet: Culture & Living Tip sheets highlight timely news and events at Washington University in St. Louis. For more information on any of the stories below or for assistance in arranging interviews, please see the contact information listed with each story. For comments on the Culture & Living news tips service, please contact the editor, Sue Killenberg McGinn at (314) 935-5254 or susan_killenberg_mcginn@aismail.wustl.edu. Author of the book on art history is subject of exhibition featuring his curatorial picks Media assistance: Liam Otten - (314) 935-8494 Source:Sabine M. Eckmann - (314) 935-5496 Related: Washington University Gallery of Art Related: Salander-O'Reilly Galleries Related: Prentice-Hall History of Art online study guide [St. Louis, Mo., September 2002] - For many students, the history of art begins with, well, The History of Art, H.W. Janson's widely used textbook on the subject, which to date has sold more than 4 million copies in 14 languages. First released in 1962, Janson's massive survey has introduced generations of young scholars to everything from cave painting and Greek sculpture to Renaissance architecture and impressionist color theory.
For much of the 1940s, Janson (who passed away in 1982) served as curator at the university, using a sharp eye and scarce funding to acquire significant pieces by many of the 20th-century's leading European and American modernists. H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis, an exhibit on view through Dec. 8, 2002, at Washington University's Gallery of Art, offers a glimpse of those years as well as a chance to explore both the great author's curatorial priorities and the forces that helped shape them -- notably, Janson's own experience as an exile from Nazi Germany. The exhibition -- which debuted in a slightly different form at New York's Salander-O'Reilly Galleries last March -- features more than 20 masterworks from the Washington University collection: half acquired by Janson, half acquired by subsequent curators looking to reinforce his curatorial foundations. Artists include Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Theo van Doesburg, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Juan Gris, Marsden Hartley, Paul Klee, Ferdinand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, Ludwig Meidner, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Yves Tanguy. "Janson was the instrumental force in selecting and acquiring modern art for the university," says Sabine M. Eckmann, Ph.D., curator for the Gallery of Art. "Having arrived in the United States in 1935 as an exile from Hitler's Germany, he rejected the National Socialists' nationalistic interpretation and propagation of German art and was committed to cosmopolitanism." 'Bold' acquisitions The show is divided into two sections -- works acquired by Janson and works acquired by his successors at Washington University.
Though less of a focus, American modernists are represented by Guston's If This Be Not I and Calder's Bayonets Menacing a Flower (both 1945). Janson also focused on the work of surrealists-in-exile, especially those he felt allowed their recent experiences and new surroundings to influence their existing artistic practices. Major acquisitions include Ernst's visionary landscape The Eye of Silence (1943-44), which conjures a haunted, war-ravaged Europe as well as a fantastical, primeval American West; and Tanguy's moody La Tour Marine (Tower of the Sea) (1944), whose bright colors and large-scaled objects seem to reflect the artist's arrival in New York. "The scope of Janson's undertaking was unusual, considering that the most progressive American museums had only begun collecting modern work in the late 1920s and 1930s," Eckmann points out. "In light of the strong anti-modernist trends then dominating the American art world -- including university museums -- one could even call it bold." Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts and director of the university's gallery, noted that "Janson's acquisitions, as well as the presence of subsequent, nationally known directors, stimulated a new generation of civic leaders to donate important works by major contemporary artists." In the 1950s and 1960s, Janson's successors like Frederick Hartt and William N. Eisendrath Jr. -- along with such prominent St. Louis collectors as Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Morton D. May, Etta Steinberg, Sydney M. Shoenberg, and Richard K. and Florence Steinberg Weil -- continued to round out Janson's early modern, cubist and expressionist projects. Highlights from this period include Matisse's Still Life With Oranges (1899); Meidner's Self Portrait (1912); Lipchitz's Pierrot with Clarinet (1919); Gorky's Golden Brown (1943-44); and Picasso's Women of Algiers, Variation 'N' (1955). Meanwhile, the acquisition of Hartley's The Iron Cross (1915) strengthened holdings in early American modernism while newer movements like abstract expressionism and art brut were represented by Pollock's Sleeping Effort (1953); de Kooning's Saturday Night (1956); and Dubuffet's Bearded Head and Bags Under the Eyes (both 1959). Staunch defender of modern art Though often viewed as a Renaissance specialist, Janson, in the 1930s and 40s, also emerged as a staunch defender of modern artists, writing favorably on Guston, Klee, Picasso, Max Beckmann and George Grosz while taking a critical scalpel to American regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. "Janson's perceptions of modern art were clearly formed against the backdrop of the anti-modernist, racist and defamatory cultural politics of National Socialist Germany," explains Eckmann, a specialist in the period (she previously co-organized, with Stephanie Barron, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 1997 survey Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler). "As an engaged defender of modern art and a harsh critic of German and American anti-modernist movements, Janson took a strong stance against national fixities." In many ways, Janson's exile experience began long before his arrival in the United States. Born in 1913 in St. Petersburg, Russia, he was raised in Hamburg, Germany, where his family settled after fleeing the October Revolution of 1917. He began his university education in Munich in 1932 but transferred the following year to Hamburg University, studying with Erwin Panofsky until the influential professor's firing by National Socialists. (Fellow students included distinguished art historians Lise Lotte Müller, William S. Heckscher and Lotte Brand Philip.) Though himself gentile, Janson left Germany both out of solidarity with his Jewish teachers and to protest Nazi cultural policies. He would even go so far as to change his name from Horst to Peter after "The Horst Wessel Song" became an anthem of the Third Reich. With Panofsky's probable assistance, Janson secured a fellowship at Harvard University, earning a master's degree in 1938 and doctorate in 1941 or '42. During those years, he also received appointments at Harvard's Fine Arts Department, the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass., and Iowa State University. Janson came to Washington University in 1941 as an assistant professor of art history (though during the war he also taught physics to American soldiers). At the time, public awareness of the university art collection was almost nonexistent. Established in 1881, the collection nevertheless lacked on-campus exhibition facilities and was held largely in storage at the City Art Museum (CAM), now the Saint Louis Art Museum. Janson himself only discovered the university's holdings, then mostly19th-century American and European paintings and applied arts, through a close reading of CAM's wall labels. In 1944, Janson lobbied for and received the appointment of Washington University curator, a position he held until leaving St. Louis in 1948. Granted a makeshift gallery in the School of Architecture, he immediately set out to raise the collection's profile, organizing exhibitions for which he often provided security by working at a desk he had brought into the room. Janson's boldest stroke came in 1945, when he guided the Art Collections Committee through the de-accessioning of 120 paintings and more than 500 additional objects -- then almost one-sixth of total holdings. The sale raised approximately $40,000 but was not without controversy. More than half the funds were brought by Frederic Remington's Dash for Timber, which fetched $23,000 -- a price, Janson later remembered, so high as to meet with public shock and the disapproval of Time magazine. Over the next year, Janson used those monies to purchase some 40 modernist paintings, sculptures and prints, mostly from exile dealers. These included Paul Rosenberg (whose apartment and gallery were located in the same Manhattan building now home to Salander-O'Reilly), Karl Nierendorf and especially Curt Valentin, as well as the former expatriate American Peggy Guggenheim. Additionally, The Eye of Silence was bought from Ernst's longtime dealer Julien Levy, while La Tour Marine came from Tanguy's childhood friend Pierre Matisse (son of Henri). "Although these dealers all gave priority to modern European art, their agendas differed," Eckmann explains. "Some were committed to modern German art banned in its homeland, others focused on French art and the surrealists in exile, and some -- to a limited degree at least -- integrated contemporary American art in their programs." As Janson himself would later recall, "Those were the times when the battle for modernism was still being fought." Yet, while influenced by these competing trends, Janson remained wary of nationally oriented allegiances, preferring an approach that was international in scope, hospitable to cross-cultural fertilization. Janson's legacy Janson left St. Louis for New York University in 1948 but, galvanized by his accomplishments, many at Washington University and in the St. Louis community continued to study, promote and collect contemporary art. In some ways, Janson's legacy in St. Louis culminated in 1960 with the opening of Washington University's Mark C. Steinberg Hall, a handsome modernist facility that included a permanent home for the Gallery of Art. The building was designed by future Pritzker Prize-winner Fumihiko Maki, then teaching at the School of Architecture, and was made possible by gifts from Etta Steinberg, in memory of her late husband, and Morton D. May. Appropriately, the dedication of Steinberg Hall was accompanied by a number of events, including lectures from the renowned art historian Leo Steinberg, the artist Walter Barker and architectural historian James Ackerman. The occasion also was marked by a major acquisition, of which Janson would surely have approved -- Picasso's Women of Algiers. The exhibition catalog features a previously unpublished 1981 lecture in which Janson recalls his years in St. Louis and his experiences building the Washington University collection. The volume also includes Eckmann's essay Exilic Vision, which explores Janson's emigration from Germany, his connections with prominent New York-based exile dealers and his early writings on modern art. The catalog, H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis, includes 60 illustrations, 33 in color, and is published by the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries and the Washington University Gallery of Art (New York/St. Louis). The Gallery of Art is the oldest art museum west of the Mississippi River. Founded in 1881 as part of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, the collection today includes some 3,000 objects, with the strongest holdings in 19th- and 20th- century European and American art and contemporary art. The gallery also owns two Egyptian mummies, several Greek vases and the Wulfing Collection of approximately 13,000 Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins, as well as a large number of prints, drawings and photographs. Currently, the gallery is working once again with architect Fumihiko Maki to develop new museum facilities. The effort comes as part of Washington University's Visual Arts & Design Center, a multi-disciplinary umbrella organization for the study and promotion of visual culture in a variety of fields. "H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis" opened Aug. 30 and remains on view through Dec. 8, 2002. The Gallery of Art is located in Steinberg Hall, near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; and noon to 4:30 p.m. weekends. (The Gallery is closed Mondays.) The exhibit is free and open to the public. For more information, call (314) 935-4523. |
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