https://www.amazon.com/Art-through-ages-introduction-significance/dp/B00085HHQW?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00085HHQW
professor art historian teacher
Gardner was born on March 17, 1878 in Manchester, New Hampshire, the youngest of four children. Her father was Charles Frederick Gardner, a native of Hingham, Massachussets, and her mother Martha W. (Cunningham) Gardner of Swanville, Maine. She had two sisters and a brother, who died in infancy. In 1891 her father, a merchant tailor and Baptist deacon, moved his family to Chicago, Illinois, where he conducted a successful business until he died in 1899.
Helen attended the Hyde Park High School in Chicago and the University of Chicago. In high school she excelled in the classics and was a member of a speaking and writing club; at the university she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with the B. A. degree in Latin and Greek in 1901. In 1915 she entered the University of Chicago graduate school; she received the M. A. degree in 1917 and was granted a fellowship in the department of art history from 1917-1918.
After graduation Gardner taught at Brooks Classical School in Chicago, where her sister Effie was principal; she served as assistant principal from 1905-1910. It was during these years evidently that her deep interest in art history developed. Until 1922 she continued to audit or take for credit a succession of art history courses. Around 1919 the Ryerson Library of the Art Institute of Chicago appointed Gardner head of the photograph and lantern slide department, and with the wealth of visual material she encountered there her ambitious plan to combine art of all ages into a single survey volume began to take shape. At the Art Institute School in the fall of 1920 she established a lecture course in world art. Two years later she resigned from her library position and devoted all her time to teaching, writing, and developing a curriculum for the study of art history. Until 1943 she continued to teach at the school, the last ten years as full professor and chairman of the history of art department. In 1927 she was a guest lecturer at the University of California in Los Angeles and in 1928 at the University of Chicago. Until Gardner published Art Through the Ages in 1926, there had been no comparable single-volume art history text of such breadth and clarity. J. M. Hopkins' Great Epochs in Art History (1901) and W. H. Goodyear's History of Art for Classes, Art-Students, and Tourists in Europe (1889) were typical of those available and while useful were lacking in illustrations, contents, and readability. It is no wonder that Art Through the Ages was seized upon eagerly as a text for many college and high school art courses; indeed, at this time history of art courses appeared in numerous high schools largely because Helen Gardner's book was available. There were good reasons for the success of the new book: scholarly insight into both the history and aesthetic quality of the subject; a careful screening of the most significant examples of each age of art with a summary and bibliography at the end of each chapter; the fine illustrations made possible by Gardner's travels in Europe and Egypt; and her knowledge of photography. In 1932 in her zeal to attract a wider audience to art appreciation, her Understanding the Arts was published. Now out of print, it was the first of a torrent of "introductions" that examined the basic qualities as well as the purposes of art. It ranged beyond the fields of painting, sculpture, and architecture to include such topics as the art of the garden and the art of city planning. Continuing popularity of Art Through the Ages led Gardner to prepare two further editions. The revised and enlarged second edition appeared in 1936. Running to almost 800 pages, it included an introduction with diagrams summarizing the visual elements of artistic expression, new maps and a pronouncing index, plus new chapters on medieval Russian, baroque, and modern art. During World War II this edition, which had already gone through four printings, was chosen as a text (paperbound) for the armed service schools. The third edition (1948) came closest to fulfilling Gardner's dream of a single art text on all fields and ages. She completed it shortly before her death, leaving unfinished a book she had planned on the arts of the Americas. An operation for breast cancer in 1944, not wholly successful, had left her in poor health, and she died of bronchopneumonia in 1946 at Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago. She was buried in the family plot in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago.
(From Preface: Today the arts are coming to the fore. Art ...)
Member of the American Association of University Women, member of the American Society of Aesthetics, member of the Midland Authors
Gardner was a small, energetic woman with endless enthusiasm, deep humanity, and a missionary zeal.
She had two sisters and a brother, who died in infancy.
