Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,977

This is the grave of George Kubler.

Born in 1912 in Hollywood, Kubler grew up wealthy. His father was an art historian, but died when his boy was only 8 years old. Kubler was sent to fancy schools and spent a lot of time as a child in Europe. He went to Yale and did all three degrees there, finishing with his PhD in 1940, focusing on the architecture of Mesoamerica. By 1938, he was already teaching at Yale and stayed there forever. He published his two volume Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century in 1948. Working with Charles Gibson, he published The Tovar Calendar in 1951. Then came The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya, and Andean Peoples, in 1962.

All of this made Kubler among the most respected architectural historians in the world. He would win all the awards and fancy prizes and visiting professorships that this class gets. It’s the kind of thing that even with the relative success I’ve had–and I am very much not complaining about my career–I cannot even imagine being a part of. There’s that kind of academic who gets all the awards and prizes and it all starts with that Yale PhD. Everything is secondary after that, no matter what you do. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was appointed to a fancy professorship at the National Gallery of Art for the 1985-86 academic year. The Mexican government granted him the Order of the Aztec Eagle as well, which is their highest honorific for foreigners. Rick Bayless has one!

Kubler wrote up his thoughts about the relationship between historical change and style in 1962’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. This became a highly respected work that crossed fields, though I confess I have never read it. But then I don’t do a lot of work with material culture. That said, I really do like the idea of centering style in history. But this is what he’s really known for. It became a very popular book with artists at the time. Robert Smithson was especially effusive about how Kubler’s book influenced him and whether works such as Spiral Jetty do that much for me (they don’t) is not really the point; Smithson was a major artist and Kubler’s ideas made him more so. Another artist heavily influenced by Kubler was John Baldessari, whose “Painting for Kubler,” from the late 60s, sold in 2009 at an auction for a mere $1.8 million. The book itself is evidently a dense text, which probably means I am unlikely to read it. It’s said to take several reads to really get it and OK, there’s value in there, but there’s probably not value for a historian such as myself.

In any case, here’s the famous first paragraph:

Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. It then becomes an urgent requirement to devise better ways of considering everything man has made.

In an interview done ten years after the book, Kubler noted the deep importance of his studying the ancient Americas in all this work. One of his contributions was toward giving the ancient object–or just the anonymity handicraft or whatnot–artistic respectability. By the 70s, not everything in the art history world had to be some work with an attributed painter or sculptor who was famous and you could relate it back to that person. The object–the good created in societies or by unfamous people–could be just as beautiful and important as the Da Vinci or Picasso. I suspect we all basically agree this is true today, or at least I hope so.

Kubler died in 1996. He was 84 years old.

George Kubler is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.

In 1991, Kubler was granted the William Clyde DeVane Medal, which honors top Yale faculty. If you would like this series to visit other winners of this medal, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The same year Kubler won it, a posthumous award was given to Bart Giamatti, who we have already visited. The economist James Tobin, who won in 1989, is in Springbrook, Wisconsin and the literary scholar Louis Martz, who won in 1985, is in Guilford, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.