George Kubler Shifting South: Architecture History Following Geopolitics¹

Eliana Sousa Santos
CES Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Abstract
This essay aims to present the shifting relations between North America and the South - South America and the South of Europe - through the work of the historian George Kubler. At the beginning of his career as a scholar, Kubler was invited by the Department of State to participate in a conference on inter-American relations. Later, with the positioning of the United States in World War II, the transatlantic relationship between the US and Europe became more prominent. Kubler’s research interests followed this change: His research shift from South America to peripheral Southern Europe reflects an availability of funding given his country's geopolitical interests. So far, artists and other scholars have praised Kubler’s vast work regarding the art and architecture of different 'Souths' mainly as a sign of 'nonalignment' and of his attention to the condition of peripheral countries.

Introduction

[1] George Kubler, the architectural historian, is known for his interest in art history's multiple patterns, both formal and conceptual. In The Shape of Time (1962), Kubler established a broad spectrum of a different kind of philosophy regarding art history, expanding its domain to every object ever made, not just masterpieces. From this perspective, other narratives can be joined to art historiography, such as politics, social issues, economics, and so forth. If we attempt this Kublerian exercise of looking at the historiography of art in relation to its political context we can find the traces of circumstantial influences within this scholarly field. In the case presented in this essay, the trajectory of Kubler's career and research interests offer a framework of the political, social and academic context in the US during the twentieth century.² At the beginning of the century, US foreign policy tended to focus on South American countries, but after World War II it shifted toward Europe. Like Kubler's, the work of his friend and art historian Robert Chester Smith follows a similar pattern. Although he divided his studies between Portuguese and Brazilian art history, in the 1940s and 1950s he produced more books about Brazil, and after that, up until the 1970s, he became more concerned with Portuguese art and architecture.

[2] As Thomas Reese has already noted,³ the Great Depression was an event that marked the beginning of Kubler's life as a college student - if not financially, at least contextually - and this event also changed the pursuits of art scholarship. In the oral history interview carried out by Reese and Richard Cándida Smith, Kubler mentioned that during the Great Depression the academic focus was on medieval studies in art history,⁴ and that his interest in the notions of frugality and the peripheral might have its origin in this contextual circumstance.

[3] The idea of medievalism as an alterity of modernity and as a sign of resistance to industrial and capitalist developments was embedded in the history of art, a notion which is particularly clear in the genealogy traced by Nikolaus Pevsner when he linked William Morris's medievalism to Walter Gropius's modernism in Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936). This general connection between medievalism, folk art and the modernist myth of origin became frequent.⁵

[4] While studying at Yale, Kubler was greatly influenced by his supervisor, the medievalist Henri Focillon.⁶ Focillon shared a fondness for Northern European popular and folk art with Jurgis Baltrusaitis - his former pupil, son in law, and colleague at Yale. In Kubler's notes about Focillon's text Art Populaire (1931), he points out that "Romanticism [worked] as [an] agent in the nineteenth century discovery of popular art by means of 'people' or 'folk' in opposition to élite, tending to display human fond commun, in a new historiography." He also notes the "Apparent contradiction: popular art as reinforcement of nationalism," and that the emergence of the appreciation of folk art appears as a "protest against machinism."⁷ Focillon considers the interest in folk art to be a parallel phenomenon to romantic medievalism:

This attempt of escape and rejuvenation takes a singular and even dramatic grandeur, when we see the principles of Mediterranean humanism, weakened by the battles of modern painting and the passionate anxiety of another humanity, of more distant secrets. When Gauguin was inspired by Breton calvaries and when he leaves to discover a more noble sadness, he went into exile in Polynesia, it follows the same curve, it obeys a logical development. We can say that it pushes the romantic Pre-Raphaelite to its last stage.⁸

[5] Following his supervisor's essential standpoint, Kubler decided to research the architecture of New Mexico in the sixteenth century.⁹ When asked about his choice of subject matter, Kubler mentioned the essential character of the architecture: "Partly because of the wish to test art historical principles on an unlikely subject of a very plain, simple, rustic, provincial character. And Focillon approved enthusiastically."¹⁰ He embarked on that endeavour because he considered that this architecture shared some essential characteristics with modern architecture. Kubler's journey to New Mexico was connected to the search for modernist traits in historical buildings.¹¹ In this way, Kubler looked at some of these objects not as artefacts belonging to a specific time, but rather as elements that belong to a certain family. He called them 'families of minds' and this was an idea that he borrowed from Focillon. This allowed Kubler to look at art history from a timeless perspective, as a network of extensive dynamics, rather than a stylistic sequence.¹²

[6] At the time of Kubler's study, New Mexico was already being explored by some modernist artists in the US. The photographers Paul Strand and Edward Weston, and the painter Georgia O'Keeffe,¹³ to name a few, were part of a larger group of artists that chose to live and work in New Mexico, depicting its light, landscapes and architecture. Laura Gilpin, another photographer, had been in New Mexico since the 1920s; many of her photographs provide illustrations for Kubler's book.¹⁴ In a sense, New Mexico was already depicted as a modern space when Kubler decided to study its colonial religious buildings.¹⁵

[7] Kubler found that the architecture of New Mexico bore a character that he would later find in other places, such as in the Portuguese architecture of the same period: "The striking quality of New Mexican folk art is its intense and austere religious expression, achieved with the minimum technical and formal means, within a rich and intricate system of traditional meanings."¹⁶ If his interest in folk art took Kubler to New Mexico in the 1930s, the US government's international policies took him further, to South America.

Visiting Peru as a 'good neighbor'

[8] In 1933, in his first inaugural address, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt [FDR] expressed his will to strengthen ties with South American nations as a strategic action of US development, or what was to be called the 'good neighbor policy'.

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor – the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others – the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.¹⁷

[9] During this period, cultural exchanges between the US and South American countries grew and this was clearly visible in popular culture. Among the many signs of this cultural cooperation, one might recall Carmen Miranda in Hollywood,¹⁸ the international career of the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, the production of Orson Welles film It's all true (1946), set in Brazil, and even Disney's vision of Latin America in Saludos Amigos (1942).¹⁹ Less prominent in popular culture, but still important, was the work of art historians such as Robert C. Smith and George Kubler, who also responded to a call from the Department of Intra-American Affairs to further their studies in South American regions.

[10] In 1939 both Smith and Kubler were invited by the United States Department of State to participate in the conference Inter-American Relations on the Field of Art.²⁰ This conference resulted from the work of the Department of State's division of Cultural Relations, created in 1938 to

encourage and strengthen cultural relations and intellectual cooperation between the United States and other countries. Although the work of the Division embraces all nations with which the United States maintains relations, the principal activities during the initial period are concerned with the other American republics.²¹

[11] The conference sessions covered several topics which included resources for Inter-American exchange in the field of art; possible exhibitions held in the US about South American nations; opportunities for student and professor exchanges between countries and the role of motion pictures as a medium of art exchange. Participants in the conference, besides Kubler and many others, were: René d'Harnoncourt, director of the Museum of Modern Art; Walter S. Cook, Director of the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University (who suggested Kubler's participation); Everett Meeks, Dean of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University; and Robert C. Smith, who at the time was part of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress. Both Kubler and Cook were assigned to attend and participate in the session regarding student and professor exchanges between Pan-American countries.

[12] Kubler's participation in the conference was fruitful, since in 1948 he was stationed by the Smithsonian Institute to conduct research in Lima, Peru. The result of his research is the short report Cuzco: Reconstruction of the Town and Restoration of its Monuments (1952). We must point out that most of Kubler's work concerning pre-Columbian art developed from this early experience. Moreover, Kubler's idea of historical time, later developed in his best known book The Shape of Time (1962), might have originated after certain observations he made in Peru. In a letter to Carroll Meeks, professor of art history at Yale, Kubler mentions the relativity of geography and historical time:

We worked with a crew of ethnologists in one place, where the life of the villagers is the perfect facsimile of what we have always supposed medieval rural life would be like. We made a photograph of one man and gave him a print; it was the first photograph he had seen. (…) But none of this life is inaccessible - on the contrary, it's a day's easy run by automobile from here, and illustrates rather how tradition and economics may isolate people far more effectively than geography.²²

[13] Kubler was, up to a point, following the steps of another Yale scholar turned anthropologist, Hiram Bingham, who was for some time credited with the discovery of Machu-Picchu in 1911, during a previous wave of pan-Americanism.²³ Kubler was hired as an anthropologist, although his education and previous work were centered in art history.²⁴ Later he admitted that he did not have any kind of formal training in anthropology. In an oral history interview, when asked about his anthropology training, he replied: "Well, I picked it [anthropology] up on the way. I don't think I ever took a course. I picked it up. I read anthropology and I had friends with whom I talked anthropology. But I never studied it separately."²⁵

[14] At the time of his brief period as an anthropologist, Kubler exchanged correspondence with Erwin Panofsky regarding his change of course. Panofsky jokingly noted that he "hope[d] that your anthropological affiliation will not entirely deprave your good art historical heart,"²⁶ to which Kubler replied: "The anthropological connection is one that still surprises me when I come to think of it, but it is only natural in America, where archaeology (and therefore the history of art) have long been the handmaidens of 'social Science' more than of philology."²⁷ In the essay "History: or Anthropology: of Art?" Kubler considers his work The Shape of Time to be on the threshold of art history and anthropology, and highlights the exchanges between the history of art and anthropology, which were, according to this text, relatively new endeavours in American academia.²⁸ In fact, at the beginning of his career, Kubler worked between the two fields.

[15] In a curious clipping from a Peruvian newspaper (Fig. 1), Kubler is described as an archaeologist.²⁹ In fact, Kubler considered that he had some training in archaeology, and that may be the reason he used the term interchangeably, even though his job description was anthropologist.³⁰

1 Newspaper clipping, George Alexander Kubler Papers, Folder Cuzco 1956. Yale University Library, New Haven, Manuscripts and archives, George Alexander Kubler Papers, MS 843, 98-M-82, Box 5.

[16] Although Kubler's research interests expanded to include Portugal and Spain, he never ceased to publish articles and books as well as to teach courses regarding issues that originated in this phase of his career.³¹ Later in his life, when asked about the repercussions of the Good Neighbor Policy in scholarship, Kubler admitted that the program was part of a plan to work with Latin American countries and turn them into useful allies, and that the work of scholars was viewed as fundamental to shape government policies regarding international relations.³²

From South America to the South of Europe

[17] Even before Kubler went to Peru,³³ US foreign policy was changing. In 1947 the Marshall Plan was put into practice.³⁴ By 1949 president Harry S. Truman gave his Inaugural Address expanding the policies set by FDR for South America to the rest of the world, stating that:

We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.³⁵

[18] The anthropologist George M. Foster exchanged opinions about this with Kubler, reflecting upcoming opportunities to carry out research funded by the US government:

There is great activity in the Interdepartmental Committee because of President Truman's Point 4 in his Inaugural Message. Everybody is trying to figure out ways of thinking up projects to save the world. We are not submitting a program, though we have suggested that anthropologists attached to agricultural missions and such things would undoubtedly be very worthwhile.³⁶

[19] In the previous year, economic cooperation between the United States and Europe through the Marshall Plan had already begun, and Kubler had been invited by Nikolaus Pevsner to participate in the publication of the Pelican History of Art. At first, Pevsner asked Kubler to choose between one of two subjects: "Once again let me have your decision soon. So much hinges on it. As you realise, it goes between two things: the pre-Columbian high cultures and Architecture of the 16^th to 18^th centuries in Spain, Portugal and their dominions. […] For each of them I can give you five years. I expect you will not accept both […]."³⁷ However, Kubler did accept both, recommending Martin Soria to collaborate with him in the volume dedicated to Spain and Portugal.

2 George Alexander Kubler: Album Page from Portuguese Album 1953. Yale University Library, New Haven, Manuscripts and archives, George Alexander Kubler Papers, MS 843, 97-M-22, Box 20.

[20] Kubler's research for each volume spanned more than a decade, despite several letters from Pevsner trying unsuccessfully to rush their completion. During this time, Kubler travelled extensively to Portugal and started other projects that would last even longer. Following Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominion: 1500-1800 (1959), Kubler published two other books directly related to Portugal: the facsimile and English translation of Felix da Costa's The Antiquity of the Art of Painting (1967) and Portuguese Plain Architecture: Between Spices and Diamonds, 1521-1706 (1972). These undertakings came to be long term projects which allowed Kubler to spend long periods of time and travel considerably throughout Portugal and other European countries from the mid-1950s onwards.³⁸ When asked if it was difficult to fund research in Iberian studies, Kubler admits that at the time it was relatively easy to access funding: "I never had trouble getting funding for those outings. Guggenheim I think I had three times. Then there's another one, the American Council of Learned Societies. Between those I had financial help on most of my research trips."³⁹

[21] In the 1970s, the focus of interest moved from continental Portugal to its former and soon to be independent colonies. In 1971, Kubler was part of the team included in Yale University's request to the Gulbenkian foundation to sponsor an academic program on "Expanded Studies on Portuguese Literature and Civilization". The main objective of the program was not centered on the study of Portuguese culture per se, since this was already part of the Portuguese studies curriculum, but on Portuguese relations to other areas:

What is interesting for present purposes is that the third-world areas chosen for curricular development – the Far East, South East Asia, Africa, Latin America and more recently, India – are precisely the regions of Portuguese colonisation, whose proper study requires extensive knowledge of Portuguese languages [sic], culture and institutions.⁴⁰

[22] In this case, interest in Portuguese culture ran parallel to the international outlook toward former colonies as well as the political interest in the provinces of Angola and Mozambique that had been at war with the metropole in their struggle for independence since 1961. These areas in Africa were at the time a proxy for the Cold War, with opposed factions being financed either by the United States or the USSR. The territories that still remained under Portuguese rule were players in the global conflict as potential areas of interest.⁴¹ Once more, interest in Portuguese culture in the realm of academics followed the interests of US foreign policy.

Coda: The unaligned South

[23] The political context in the US during the twentieth century, and its policies regarding international affairs, were pervasive in academic and even in popular culture; in part, this influenced Kubler's career path and its expansion from South America to peripheral Southern Europe: the Iberian Peninsula.

[24] Nevertheless, the marginal character of the cultures in question – South America in relation to North America, the Iberian Peninsula in relation to Northern Europe – pointed the historian's attention toward the peripheral, the minor and the incidental. Just as medieval studies were focused on lesser subjects at the time of the Great Depression, Kubler also found the same essence in other cultures – in the walls of Cusco, Peru as in those of the Jerónimos Monastery, Portugal. Although Kubler's research was partially guided by US international policies and funding, his interest in the particular, the small and the peripheral came to be perceived by other historians and artists alike as an ideological inclination to radical positions.

[25] The artist Juan Downey (1940-1993), who produced video essays about relevant historical and political moments, was inspired to create a film manifesting the nature of Kubler's Portuguese Plain Architecture (1972).⁴² In Downey's film plan, Plain Architecture was to be presented as an "Architecture of Crisis" that traversed several moments of history.⁴³

[26] In post-revolutionary Portugal,⁴⁴ several architects embraced the notion of Portuguese Plain as a rediscovery of a new tradition, still untainted by the previous political regime. Duarte Cabral de Mello, when referring to the social housing projects of Vítor Figueiredo, made the first comparison of Plain Architecture with contemporary practice. In a special issue of Architecture d'Aujourd'hui (1976), a group of Portuguese architects presented their work as a manifestation of a revolutionary environment, even though many of the projects shown were in fact designed and built before the revolution.⁴⁵ Other international publications, such as Lotus International, published many housing projects by the architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, focusing on the connection between social housing design, building with scarce resources and the notion of revolution. The revolutionary process was presented as embedded in the aesthetic and practice of architecture.⁴⁶

[27] In the 1990s, the debate about the importance of Portuguese Plain reemerged following the publication of the Portuguese translation of Kubler's Portuguese Plain Architecture in 1988,⁴⁷ and in the wake of the Portuguese entry to the European Union.

[28] In an essay presenting the history of Portuguese architecture, as part of the Europalia Festival dedicated to Portugal in 1991, the architecture historian Paulo Varela Gomes defines a genealogy of a national Portuguese architecture that borrows its argument from Kubler's Portuguese Plain Architecture.⁴⁸ Later, Varela Gomes defined Kubler's book as a symptom of the country's non-aligned position, placing Kubler's research interests within the sphere of the nations that stood against the globalizing policies of the US. Varela Gomes points out that in the 1980s the prominence of Kubler's book in the history of art showed that Portugal stood against the grain of European historiography and that it had a singular position: within art historiography Portugal was non-aligned with Europe. This was part of an "ideological desideratum" that allowed "a positive appreciation of buildings, or groups of buildings that didn't fit into the standard categories of European historiography such as Renaissance, Mannerism or Baroque".⁴⁹ This enabled the interest regarding the marginal – Portuguese architecture – to regain a central position within its own historiography - Plain Architecture.

[29] Thus, Kubler's Portuguese Plain Architecture (1972) created a framework that enabled considering Portugal as having a specific architectural culture, given its peripheral nature. Kubler's attention toward the 'other' might have been prompted by a genuine interest in the peripheral, and it was also encouraged by US government foreign policy.

Acknowledgements
This essay is co-financed by the POPH program of the European Social Fund and by National Funds by FCT Foundation for Science and Technology, with a postdoctoral grant with the reference SFRH/BPD/68962/2010.

Local Editor
Joana Cunha Leal, Instituto de História da Arte, FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Reviewers
Reva Wolf, New Paltz, State University of New York
Nuno Senos, CHAM, FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa

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The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0