ABSTRACT
Helen Gardner’s perennially popular art history textbook Art Through the Ages was based on the innovative survey course the author taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1920 and her death in 1946. In the first two editions of the book, 1926 and 1936, Gardner, a cultural relativist in the Germanic tradition favored at her alma mater, the University of Chicago, ranged widely across the globe and touched upon a diversity of material culture. However, her third edition, revised in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan and published posthumously in 1948, represented a radical reorganization. In this unprecedented volume, a “world panorama of art” unfolds horizontally rather than vertically. In Gardner’s inclusive vision, Medieval Chinese artifacts commingle with the Renaissance art of Northwest Coast Indians, the whole culminating optimistically in a chapter devoted to the utopian internationalism of the modern industrial arts. Sadly, little of Gardner’s ingenious scheme survived the Cold War revision of her text in 1959, as the new editors chose to reject globalism in favor of hierarchies based on elitist tastes and nationalist ideologies.
