One of the most widely read art history books in the United States is Gardner's Art Through the
Ages.
The first sentence of the first chapter reads: 'What Genesis is to the biblical account of the fall
and redemption of man, early cave art is to the history of his intelligence, imagination, and creative power.' This is
followed by subchapter headings like 'The Reprentation of Man' and discussion of 'perhaps the most famous' of early female
figurines, the Venus of Willendorf, in which 'the artist's aim was not to show the female of this kind, but rather
the idea of female fecundity; he depicted not woman, but fertility.'
The use of 'he'- the assumption that the artist is male- excludes half of the population from being endowed
with the talent to create. When I first read Gardner and similar influential textbooks like Janson's History of
Art some twenty years ago, I did not see that I, as a woman, was excluded from the possiblity of contributing to the
canon of great works by great men. I did not seethat the language of these texts spoke of this exclusion in the use
of the personal pronoun 'he'. This blindness to what is now clearly visible to me was ideology at work. I
accepted patriarchal language as natural and neutral and the way things should be. This was most likely the case with
Helen Gardner when she wrote Art Through the Ages.
Gardener was first published in 1926 and Janson in 1962, and in the recent edition of Gardner (which is
generally considered more 'progressive' because there is more of an attempt to contextualize the works of Art) the editors
have included a disclaimer int he preface that states that the editors and writers do not have any 'prejudice' against women,
nor are they trying to disparage women in their use of 'he' for both sexes and terms like 'mankind' for the human race.
But Gardner is a book whose purpose is to explore the meaning and power of representation. That its editors and authors
disavow the meaning and power of a thousand pages of exclusionary, patriarchal language is an unfortunate irony.
Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art.
