George Kubler Research Paper

Richard Cándida Smith
Department of History
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

The Other Side of Meaning:
George Kubler on the Object as Historical Source

forthcoming in Intellectual History Newsletter, vol. 23, 2001

The objects that men and women have made provide the most enduring trace of human activity extending back tens of thousands of years in every part of the globe. In a handful of locations, as in Europe or East Asia, traditions of collecting and connoisseurship developed around the preservation of particularly valued objects, creating in the process a document trail that helps tell the story of what was selected for preservation and why. Things provide a record of human action but for much of art
history,
His approach was capacious rather than technical, and he challenged the assumptions guiding the work of most art historians. 4
The courses Kubler took from Focillon as an undergraduate sparked his imagination and captured him for a career in art history, though like his mentor he would feel somewhat at odds with the direction of the field. By the time Kubler began his graduate studies, Focillon had started developing an art history department for Yale organized around his conceptions of cultural history. The department was formally launched in 1940, three years before Focillon’s untimely death. The faculty for the new department consisted almost entirely of students who had worked for Focillon during the preceding decade. Even before he finished his dissertation on New Mexican religious architecture in 1940, Kubler joined the Yale faculty as the department’s resident
Hispanist, specializing in all aspects of Iberian and Latin American art and culture, including that of pre-Conquest Native American societies. He remained at Yale for the rest of his life.

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The Focillon group at Yale stood apart from the traditions of connoisseurship
The book very consciously articulated a critique of connoisseurship, iconology, and stylistic studies—indeed of pretty much everything that defined the practice of art history in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.
The Focillon approach to art history treated all objects equally as potential evidence for how people thought and lived. No priority was to be given to so-called
“masterworks” or great artists. Focillon equally dismissed stylistic grouping and interpretation. Stylistic analysis required creating what Focillon referred to as la ligne des hauteurs, a series of monuments, chosen because they facilitated a retrospective definition of cultural preferences of a geographic location or of a time period. A fuller examination of objects, however, often showed that stylistic unities did not go very deeply into the surviving material record, and indeed stylistic analysis inevitably required the exclusion of work and artists not clearly or comfortably fitting into the categories selected to define a style.