The Abduction of Grant Wood.
Getting carried away with Janson, Wood, and Rembert.
Horst Janson was a busy art historian in 1955. Fleeing Hitler’s rise two decades prior, Janson came to the US under sponsorship of MoMA’s Alfred Barr, first at the Worcester Art Museum and then at the University of Iowa. With a PhD from Harvard, he joined NYU’s faculty, busying himself, by the 1950s, with the epic tome for which he is remembered. 1962’s History of Art has become one of two standard texts of art history; in its later editions, it has been titled Janson’s History of Art, to underscore its authority.1 That big project was still a few years away from launch in 1955, but Janson found time to settle some scores; for some reason, he chose to begin with his erstwhile colleague, the long-suffering, closeted, and long-dead Grant Wood. I’m indebted to Lauren Kroiz’s excellent Cultivating Citizens2 for the insight that Janson joined other critics of Wood by channelling their attacks through gendered and heteronormative codes, but I’ll leave to you to judge the nature of the ad hominem in the title of Janson’s hit piece: “The Case of the Naked Chicken.”
The chicken in question was, according to Janson, The Platonic Chicken, in two ways. Janson was transfixed with Wood’s paintings and prints featuring a feather-less, live chicken, in works coyly titled Adolescence (there are multiple versions). Janson took issue with a possibly apocryphal story about the work’s inspiration attributed to Wood in an interview years prior. Janson found it “unlikely” that Wood was inspired simply by seeing a chicken in Iowa, but that instead he knew of a print by Ugo da Carpi based on a painting by Parmigianino that depicted a similar chicken—a chicken which referenced—stay with me, reader!—a remark by a character in a Socratic dialogue that joked that Man is a featherless chicken. It’s more likely that Wood’s inspiration came from Plato, Janson argued, than the farmyards around Cedar Rapids, because art is about iconography—it’s about polishing the Platonic form of Chicken:
“The skeptical art historian . . . knows that a work of art, at least insofar as its formal structure is concerned, is far more likely to reflect other works of art, rather than reality.”3
Since we’re considering the Greeks, let’s take Janson’s view from a classical perspective. There are three types of reasoning: deduction leads to logical certainties (“2 + 2 = 4”); induction leads to empirical truths (“The Knicks lost”); and abduction gives us the “inferences to the likeliest explanation” (“Covid 19 originated in a wet market”). Janson, the author of the definitive text on art history, prefers abduction. Behold:
There are very few live featherless chickens in Western art.
It’s possible that Grant Wood saw Ugo da Carpi’s chicken during Wood’s time in Munich 1928-9, or at another time and place, as it was readily available in reproduction (“almost anywhere”).
Wood’s chicken looks similar to Ugo’s “to a degree that cannot be accounted for by coincidence alone.”
While “there is no reason to question his sincerity,” Wood’s explanation of the inspiration for the chicken in his own work—namely, a real-life encounter with a chicken—“has a pat ‘Vasarian’ touch that warns us not to trust it entirely.”4
By inference to the simplest explanation, Janson concludes,
“It is thus not at all unreasonable to suppose that Grant Wood ran across [Ugo’s chicken] . . . The meaning of the image escaped him, of course . . . But for that very reason the plucked rooster may well have struck him as particularly odd and, in its grotesque way, rather impressive. Only after he had met his first chicken on a personal basis, so to speak, did the memory of the plucked rooster come alive for him, although by then he had probably forgotten where he had seen it, or even that he had seen it.”
This is bad scholarship. Janson’s argument makes sense for, say, paintings of George Washington: Grant Wood, being short on personal encounters with America’s first president must have relied upon antecedent paintings of George Washington for his own portrayal of George Washington. But the scarcity of plucked live chickens in Western art together with the extremely common event of beholding a chicken in the state of Iowa demonstrates the opposite of Janson’s claim: this thing happens so rarely that “coincidence” has strong explanatory power.
When Janson and Wood were on the faculty of University of Iowa together, they hated each other. But why bring it all up again, decades later and two thousand miles away from the site of their last feud?
Janson wanted a tidy art history where historians fitted its pieces together with iconographic interpretations. Art was for Janson not social or expressive or meta-textual, but a spatially-arranged manifest of coded images—codes that, not coincidentally, only a “good historian” could decode. (Not surprisingly, Janson thought Janson was among the few up to the job.) Above this, however, is the faith that historicization is not only the best but the only interpretive lens through which to engage with art. While the connotations of the word “abduction” are strictly coincidental, it does feel like Janson has spirited something away.
II. Winfred Rembert.
I’m talking about Platonic ideals, but there are real consequences to Janson’s notion of art history.
A few weeks ago, I came across examples of Winfred Rembert’s leather paintings at the American Art Fair. Maybe “painting” isn’t the right word: they are stippled, cut, soaked, and stained leather. Rembert grew up in the Jim Crow South but most of his working life as an artist took place a few blocks from the arts magnet high school I went to in New Haven in the 1990s. I guess I’d seen them somewhere—like how maybe Wood saw Ugo?—but until a few weeks ago, Rembert wasn’t on my radar. So I mainlined his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography and cast about for more background on these strange, disturbing, and puzzling objects. Here’s Rembert in his own words:
“Looking up at his parents is the first thing a child is supposed to remember. Not me. It seemed like I opened my eyes to cotton . . . I opened my eyes and I saw that cotton, and it was a beautiful thing. When you get out there picking in it, though, you change your mind about how beautiful it is.”5
The memoir goes on to drive home that disjunct: Rembert’s struggle to reconcile the brutality of the environment into which he was born and the terrible beauty with which that environment imprinted itself onto his young mind. The works attest to the privations he endured, but also to their normalcy—a perspective that is valuable, and conspicuously absent from Janson’s History of Art.
Can you find pictures to antedate Rembert’s On Mama’s Cotton Sack? Isn’t there a story to tell by pairing Rembert with Degas’s A Cotton Office in New Orleans? Sure—and this is what museums are doing more and more: putting new voices next to the sanctioned official pictures. But there’s no way to read Rembert out of Degas. And why would you want to? Rembert’s work, lately “discovered” by the market for the first time, can be profoundly moving. His complicated and nuanced autobiography repositions his personal iconography—it builds its own context. I’ve never picked cotton, but the sadness of a little boy struggling to be loved by a hateful world has resonance that Degas or Ugo or Parmigianino have yet to stir in me.
Rembert’s career post-dates Janson’s life significantly, but it’s hard to see how any picture of Rembert’s finds its way into Janson’s list of facts.
III. Making the Cut.
That’s one consequence of Janson’s philosophy of art history, which, I emphasize, remains one of the two standard art history texts today.6 Rembert is a cherry-picked anecdote, but here’s a handy datapoint for measuring another trend in Janson:
0. Zero. That’s the number of women artists mentioned in Janson’s 1962 edition.7 No Mary Cassatt, no Georgia O’Keeffe, no Lee Krasner—nothing. Of course there have been revisions since its initial publication, but Janson’s History of Art is a fundamentally bad project because of the first principles upon which it was built.
As for Janson’s war against Wood, the painter has had the last laugh. Whatever possessed Janson to attack Wood in 1955, it was a committed position: he never included Wood in any edition of History of Art. But when the book was revised in 2006 to include some of the women Janson omitted, its editors made a conspicuous addition. American Gothic made the cut.8
Thanks for reading. Yay for Pride! Yay for the Art Students League turning 150! Boo for the Knicks losing and boo for nearly everything else.
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
If the thing is not already propping up your hutch, you can peruse a recent edition here.
Lauren Kroiz, Cultivating Citizens: The Regionalist Work of Art in the New Deal Era (2018); see chapter 4, “Grant Wood, H. W. Janson, and the Case of the Naked Chicken,” pp. 74-92.
Horst Janson, “The Case of the Naked Chicken,” College Art Journal, winter, 1955, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 124-127.
The dig at Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is so “Janson.” Vasari is riddled with apocrypha and scuttlebutt, but Janson brings him as a straw man, so as to position his own project as definitive, rather than novelistic.
Winfred Rembert with Erin I. Kelly, Chasing Me to My Grave, (2022).
Janson’s competitor, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, which turns 100 next year, is much less vulnerable to the myopia that claims Janson. There’s a woman right on the spine: Helen Gardner (1878-1946).
The observation comes from Norma Broude and Mary Garrard’s Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, which published the year Janson died, in 1982: “H.W. Janson's influential textbook, History of Art, first published in 1962, contained neither the name nor the work of a single woman artist.” Full text here.
Randy Kennedy, “Revising Art History’s Big Book: Who’s In and Who Comes Out?,” The New York Times, Mar. 7, 2006.