Art Historians

Kuile, E. H., ter

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kuile, E. H., ter

Other Names:

E. H. ter Kuile

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1988

Place Born: Ambt-Almelo, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), conservation (discipline), conservation (process), Dutch (culture or style), Netherlandish, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Professor of History of Architecture at Delft University of Technology; active at the Netherlands Department for the Conservation of Historic Buildings and Sites. Ter Kuile attended the Gymnasium in Deventer. In 1920 and 1921 he studied architecture, decorative arts, and arts and crafts in Haarlem. In 1922, he became a law student at Leiden University. After one year, he switched to history of art and archaeology, in which field he graduated in 1927. In 1929, he obtained his doctorate with a dissertation on wooden spires in the Northern Netherlands: De houten torenbekroningen in de Noordelijke Nederlanden. During the preparation of his dissertation, supervised by Wilhelm Martin, he worked as a voluntary assistant at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. Soon after obtaining his degree, he was appointed curator at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede. In 1931, he began his career in the field of documentation and preservation of historic monuments, first at the Rijkscommissie voor de Monumentenzorg, and from 1933 at the Rijksbureau voor de Monumentenzorg, where he served for many years, gradually climbing to higher positions in 1937, 1942, and 1959. As an employee of this latter organization, which had been created in 1918 (from 1947 onwards known as the Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg, i.e., the Netherlands Department for the Conservation of historic Buildings and Sites), he contributed five volumes to the series De Nederlandse Monumenten van Geschiedenis en Kunst. His architectural research led to numerous publications in the Bulletin of the Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond (Dutch Antiquarian Association), of which he was the editor for some years. Between 1949 and 1955, he was the president of this association. In 1946 he obtained a teaching position, and subsequently, in 1947, an extraordinarius professorship in the history of architecture at Delft University of Technology. He held his inaugural lecture in October 1947: Het venster in de geschiedenis van de monumentale Westerse architectuur. In addition, between 1949 until 1951, he taught art history, after the retirement of W. A. E. van der Pluym (1879-1960). Ter Kuile also served as the librarian of the department of architecture. The first of two English surveys on sculpture and architecture appeared as the Pelican series Art and Architecture in Belgium: 1600-1800 in1960, co-authored by Horst Gerson. In 1966 he and Seymour Slive and Jakob Rosenberg wrote the accompanying volume for the Netherlands, Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600-1800. These publications led to a wider recognition of his work. His book on Netherlands Romanesque churches appeared in 1975: De Romaanse kerkbouwkunst in de Nederlanden. It covered both the Northern and the Southern Netherlands, including Belgium. The revised second edition of this book was presented to ter Kuile at the age of 82. While most of his work was in Dutch, he occasionally published in French and English. In 1962, he contributed a French article, on the Carolingian churches of Oosterbeek and Tienhoven, to the Festschrift Murk Daniël Ozinga, professor in the history of architecture at Utrecht University. When he retired from Delft University, he was offered a Liber Amicorum: Delftse studiën. His fare well lecture on June 24, 1965 was on Kleurige Architectuur (colorful architecture). Ter Kuile continued publishing after his retirement. His fifth, and last, contribution to the series De Nederlandse Monumenten van Geschiedenis en Kunst appeared in 1974. At the age of 78, he published a study on the architecture of the former residence of the counts of Holland in the Binnenhof at The Hague. His students included C. L. Temminck Groll and J.C. Visser, whose dissertations of 1963 and 1964, respectively, were both on urban architecture in the Middle Ages. Ter Kuile did research on architecture from Antiquity until the nineteenth century. Medieval architecture was one of his favorite fields, in which he published a number of important studies, often on individual monuments. A particularly important study was on the original connection between three churches in Utrecht and the church of St. Lebuinus in Deventer, built under Bishop Bernold of Utrecht (1027-1054). Ter Kuile was attentive to the material and esthetical aspects of buildings and had a strong affinity for the space in architecture.

Selected Bibliography

[For a list of his publications until 1965, see:] Kamstra, T. “Publikaties van E.H. ter Kuile” in Delftse studiën, pp. 410-416; [1966-1979:] Bulletin Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond 87, 2 (1988) 77. [Dissertation:] De houten torenbekroningen in de Noordelijke Nederlanden; bijdrage tot hun ontwikkelings- en vormgeschiedenis. Leiden, 1929; “Bouwkunst der Nederlanden: 1600-1800” in Algemene kunstgeschiedenis. IV. Utrecht, 1949, pp. 215-221; “De architectuur.” in Fockema Andreae, S.J.; Ter Kuile, E.H; Hekker, R.C. Duizend jaar bouwen in Nederland. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Albert de Lange, 1948, pp. 131-386; 1957, pp. 77-194; and Gerson, H. Art and Architecture in Belgium: 1600-1800. The Pelican History of Art 18. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1960; and Rosenberg, Jakob and Slive, Seymour. Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600-1800. The Pelican History of Art 27. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966; De Romaanse kerkbouwkunst in de Nederlanden. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1975. “De bouwgeschiedenis van het grafelijk paleis op het Binnenhof” Holland 10 (1978): 313-328. [Book review:] Van den Berg, Herma, M. “Engelbert H. ter Kuile, De Romaanse kerkbouwkunst in de Nederlanden.” Bulletin Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond (1979): 33-35.

Sources

Ter Kuile, G.J. jr. “Engelbert Hendrik ter Kuile. Een biografische studie.” in Meischke R. and others (eds.) Delftse studiën. Een bundel historische opstellen over de stad Delft geschreven voor dr. E.H. Ter Kuile naar aanleiding van zijn afscheid als hoogleraar in de geschiedenis van de Bouwkunst. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967; Temminck Groll, C.L. “In Memoriam Engelbert Hendrik ter Kuile.” Bulletin Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond 87, 2 (1988) 75,77; Bosman, Lex. “De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse architectuurgeschiedenis: middeleeuwse bouwkunst” in Hecht, Peter; Stolwijk Chris; Hoogenboom, Annemieke (eds.) Kunstgeschiedenis in Nederland.Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1998, pp. 63-87.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen and Monique Daniels

Kühnel, Ernst

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kühnel, Ernst

Gender: male

Date Born: 1882

Date Died: 1964

Place Born: Neubrandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Islam and Islamic (culture or style)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Curator over the Islamic collections of the State Museum (Kaiser Friedrich) in Berlin. During his time as a student at Heidelberg, his colleagues included Rosa Schapire, Edwin Redslob, Walter Kaesbach, and Emil Waldmann. Kühnel was part of the group who launched the important 1910 exhibition of Islamic art in Munich. Among his assistants in the late 1920s and 30s was Richard Ettinghausen. In 1922 he updated the book on Persian rugs by Wilhelm Bode. He and Heinrich Glück and Ernst Diez authored the Islamic art volume for the prestigious Propyläen Kunstgeschichte series in 1925. Kühnel wrote supplements to Adolph Goldschmidt‘s Die Elfenbeinskulpturen and his Die byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X.-XIII. Jahrhunderts, Die islamischen Elfenbeinskulpturen. VIII.-XIII. Jahrhundert, published posthumously in 1971.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliographie des Schrifttums von Ernst Kühnel.” Aus der Welt der islamischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel zum 75. Geburtstag am 26. 10. 1957. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1959, pp. 388-404; and Bode, Wilhelm von. Vorderasiatische Knüpfteppiche aus alter Zeit. 3rd ed. [first for Kühnel]. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1922, English, Antique Rugs from the Near East. New York: E. Weyhe, 1922; and Sarre, Friedrich Paul Theodor, and Martin, F. R. Die Ausstellung von Meisterwerken muhammedanischer Kunst in München, 1910. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1912; and Goetz, Hermann. Indische Buchmalereien aus dem Jahángîr-Album der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Berlin: Scarabaeus-Verlag, g.m.b.h., 1924; and Glück, Heinrich, and Diez, Ernst. Die Kunst des Islam. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1925, English, Islamic Art & Architecture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966; Die islamischen Elfenbeinskulpturen. VIII.-XIII. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1971; and Volbach, Wolfgang Fritz. Late Antique Coptic and Islamic Textiles of Egypt. London: W. & G. Goyle, 1926; Islamische Kleinkunst. Berlin: R. C. Schmidt & Co., 1925, English, The Minor Arts of Islam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971.

Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 233-4.

Curator over the Islamic collections of the State Museum (Kaiser Friedrich) in Berlin. During his time as a student at Heidelberg, his colleagues included Rosa Schapire, Edwin Redslob,

Kühn, Herbert

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kühn, Herbert

Gender: male

Date Born: 1895

Date Died: 1980

Place Born: Beelitz, Mark, Brandenburg, Germany

Place Died: Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 230-3.

Kuhn, Charles L.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kuhn, Charles L.

Other Names:

Charles Louis Kuhn

Gender: male

Date Born: 1901

Date Died: 1985

Place Born: Cincinnati, Hamilton, OH, USA

Place Died: Cambridge, Middlesex, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): curators

Overview

Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and Chair of Harvard’s Fine Arts Department. Kuhn received his A.B. from the University of Michigan in 1923 and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1929. His dissertation, later published, is on Romanesque painting in Catalonia. In 1930 he was appointed curator of the Germanic Museum (later Busch-Reisinger), replacing founding curator Kuno Francke. Kuhn was responsible for turning a small cultural museum with plaster reproductions into an important art museum. He raised funds for acquisitions and a new building. As early as 1932 he mounted exhibitions of contemporary German painting. Although a medievalist by training, Kuhn was willing to take advantage of the current art market for modern art rather than force acquisitions toward his predilections. The outstanding Expressionist collection the Busch-Reisinger owns today is almost entirely of his doing. As Hitler closed German contemporary-art museums for being what he considered degenerate, Kuhn acquired the works for his museum. When Walter Gropius immigrated to the United States and to Harvard, Kuhn used the architect’s connections and knowledge to secure many Bauhaus colleague’s art work. The personal papers of Gropius and Lyonel Feininger were also acquired under his direction. Kuhn was Editor of the Art Bulletin 1948-9 and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard between 1949-1953. His most well-known written work is his corpus of medieval and renaissance German paintings in American collections.

Selected Bibliography

A Catalogue of German Paintings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in American Collections. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936; German and Netherlandish Sculpture, 1280-1800, the Harvard Collections. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1965; German Expressionism and Abstract art: the Harvard Collections. With an introductory essay by Jakob Rosenberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957; [dissertation:] Catalonian Romanesque Frescoes. Harvard, 1929, published as, Romanesque Mural Painting of Catalonia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930.

Sources

Busch-Reisinger Museum: History and Holdings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1991, pp. 29-31.

Kuh, Katharine

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kuh, Katharine

Other Names:

Katharine Kuh

Gender: female

Date Born: 1904

Date Died: 1994

Place Born: St. Louis, Saint Louis City, MO, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Pioneer modernist art historian of Chicago; first woman curator of European Art and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1954-59. Woolf was the daughter of Morris Woolf and Olga Weiner (Woolf). Her father, a British-born Jewish silk importer and distant relation to the publisher and author Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), moved from the family home of St. Louis to Chicago in 1909. She was raised in Chicago. While traveling with her family in Europe in 1914, she contracted polio, spending the subsequent years in a body brace. During her enforced solitude, her father interested her in collecting old master prints (today, Olga Woolf Collection, 1941 Art Institute of Chicago).Kuh’s mother was also an art devotee who once engineered visit to a Boston restaurant in order for her daughter and her to witness John Singer Sargent and the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner having lunch. After her recovery, she graduated from Vassar College in 1925 where a course on modern art taught by the young graduate student Alfred H. Barr, Jr., later first director of the Museum of Modern Art, convinced her to study art history. She remained friends with Barr his entire life. After a Master’s Degree in art history at the University of Chicago in 1929, she moved to New York to pursue a Ph.D. at New York University. She attended night classes in New York while working the day at the American Association for Labor Legislation. She returned to Chicago in 1930, marrying businessman George Kuh. Kuh, however, envisioned a stay-at-home wife and his relatives openly mocked her taste in art. The couple divorced in 1935 and that same year Kuh opened the first gallery devoted to avant-garde art in Chicago, The Katharine Kuh Gallery. Her gallery featured art by Picasso, Kandinsky, Albers, Léger and Klee. Ansel Adams became a life-long friend when she devoted a show to his work. Because sales of modern art were infrequent, she supported herself and the gallery by presenting courses on art history. Among her early patrons were the (later) Chicago artist Claire Zeisler (1903-1991). She sponsored the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) for American citizenship in 1938. Kuh developed an important personal collection of modern art, at times taking advantage of its relatively unknown status in Chicago. She once bought ten works at a local auction, including Kandinskys, Jawlenskys and Man Rays for $110. Among her notable public battles were with the arch conservative group, Sanity in Art. A single woman in the art world, she maintained a number of affairs, mostly with married men. An early and extended one was with the artist Carlos Mérida, whom she represented in her gallery. Her gallery closed in 1943 but was hired by Art Institute of Chicago director Daniel Catton Rich hired her to fill in the public relations position vacated by his staff in wartime duties. Kuh edited the museum’s Quarterly beginning in 1946, rising to charge of the museum’s Gallery of Interpretive Art. Around this time she and Rich, himself married, began a long-term affair. After the war, Kuh, under Rich’s direction, mounted the first post-war exhibition of modern art in Chicago, the Arensberg collection, in 1949. In 1951, she published her first book, a work on art appreciation, titled Art Has Many Faces. She began writing art criticism for the Saturday Review in 1953. In 1954 she was appointed the first woman curator of European Art and Sculpture at the Institute. However, despite assembling the American contribution for the Venice Biennale in 1956, the United States committee declined to allow a woman to be commissioner, and selected Rich instead. During these years, she helped acquire many of the notable works of modern art for the museum. Rich left the Institute in 1958 and the following year, she too resigned, pursuing a career in New York as a collection advisor. She assembled a corporate collection of modern art for the First National Bank of Chicago, one of the finest in the country for the time. The 1960’s and 70’s Kuh spent writing a number of other books including, The Artist’s Voice, 1962, Break-up: The Core of Modern Art, 1965, and The Open Eye: in Pursuit of Modern Art, 1971.Kuh had a fiery temper; her disagreements with the ever-placid Rich rang throughout halls of the curatorial department of the AIC.

Selected Bibliography

Art Has Many Faces: the Nature of Art Presented Visually. New York: Harper, 1951; The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists. New York: Harper & Row, 1962; Break-up: the Core of Modern Art. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1965; The Open Eye: in Pursuit of Art. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Sources

Berman, Avis. “The Katharine Kuh Gallery: An Informal Portrait.” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde. Prince, Sue Ann, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990, pp. 155-69; Kuh, Katherine. My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator. New York: Arcade, 2006; [obituary] Smith, Roberta. “Katherine Kuh, Art Connoisseur And Writer, 89.” New York Times January 12, 1994, p. B7.

Kugler, Franz

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kugler, Franz

Other Names:

Franz Kugler

Gender: male

Date Born: 19 January 1800

Date Died: 18 March 1858

Place Born: Szczecin, West Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Prussian

Overview

Key figure in the early development of the discipline of art history (“Berlin School”); author of one of the first surveys of art history; cultural administrator for the Prussian state. He was born in Stettin, Germany, which is present-day Szczecin, Poland. Kugler’s father was Johann Georg Emanuel Kugler, a successful merchant and city father (German Counselor). The younger Kugler studied literature, music and the visual arts at the University of Berlin. Music remained with him his whole life; he penned the Volkslied “An der Saale hellem Strande,” to a tune by Friedrich Ernst Fesca (1789-1826) in 1826. Although he briefly attended classes at Heidelberg, he returned to Berlin in 1827 studying architecture at the Bauakademie. In 1831 he received his doctorate under Ernst Heinrich Toelke (1785-1869) writing his dissertation on medieval illuminated manuscripts. He habilitated two years later. In 1833 he was named Professor of art history at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and a [privatdozent at the university in Berlin. Together with poet Robert Reinick (1805-1852) he published a Liederbuch für deutsche Künstler (Songbook for German Artists) the same year. In 1837 Kugler published his two-volume Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei (History of Painting); second only, perhaps, to the Italienische Forschungen of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, which he likely took as a model, for a synthetic history of painting and considered by many as “first universal history of painting” (Metzler). Though Kugler personally called it a cut-and-paste job, the Handbuch was full of insights and authority (Kultermann). For example, Kugler was the first to apply the term “Carolingian” in the context of art history. His concept of a Carolingian style of art was adopted by Gustav Friedrich Waagen only two years later. The following year, 1840, Kugler published a biography of Frederick the Great, Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen. The year 1842 was a particularly momentous one for Kugler. He was named to the academic senate and brought out his Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, (Handbook of Art History) the first survey world art. That same year he also published a monograph on the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The following year he was appointed to the Ministry of Culture overseeing all the arts of Prussia. Kugler used this position of power to take an enlightened approach to art, defining his position as one to elevate art and artists in Prussia, rivaling that Weimar. That year, too, 1843, Karl Julius Ferdinand Schnaase wrote the second synthetic history of art, and, although completely dissimilar, dedicated to Kugler. In 1845, Kugler was called to be part of a famous consultation of art historians to determine which of two version of Hans Holbein’s Burgomeister Meyer Madonna in Germany was the original. Kugler examined the Berlin (later Darmstadt) version (now believed to be the original). His essay “Ueber den Pauperismus auch in der Kunst” appeared in 1845 as well. The second edition of Part I of Kugler’s Handbook of the History of Painting, The Italian Schools, was translated in 1851 by art writer Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, bringing his work into cognition with the English-reading world. After his death, his opinion on the Burgomeister Meyer Madonna came to be part of the body of critical opinion, the so-called “Holbein convention” held in 1871. His son, Bernhard Kugler (1837-1898) was a professor of medieval history at Tübingen. Kugler was the central figure of the emerging “Berlin School” of art history (Kultermann). Like his contemporaries, including Gustav A. Heider, Kugler wedged his art writing amid his administrative duties because the discipline was too young to make as a vocation. The Handbuch is considered one of the early art history survey texts whose theme was global art. Kugler divided world art history into four periods, Pre-Hellenic, Classical (Greek and Roman antiquity), “Romantic” (Medieval and the rise of Islam) and Modern (from the Renaissance to the 19th century). He projected a Romantic view of the Germans as the true successors of the Greeks through something Kugler termed their Organismus (“organic unity”) with the Greeks. German medieval art, according to Kugler, was the honest expression of the people. Renaissance art was viewed by Kugler as degenerate and derivative. In the 1847 revision of his Handbuch, Burckhardt, the Renaissance scholar, changed the emphasis. Kugler’s teachings continue to inspire. The American medievalist Robert Branner used Kugler’s concept of Organismus in his own teaching about the related of art to its context (Armi). Kugler’s most eminent student was the Jacob Burckhardt, himself a key figure in art history and methodology. He was friends with the artist Adolf Menzel (who illustrated Kugler’s book on Frederick the Great) and Schinkel, whose biography he wrote. Kugler (and Waagen) were the first to describe a characteristic style within the Romanesque art, first noted by Johann Dominico Fiorillo, as “Ottonian art.” Kugler in particular emphasized its the Byzantine influence and its free adaptation in the style.

Selected Bibliography

Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei von Constantin dem Grossen bis auf die neuere Zeit. 2 vols. Berlin: Bei Duncker und Humbolt, 1837; Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen. Leipzig: 1840; Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte. 3 vols. 1842; Karl Friedrich Schinkel: eine Charakteristik seiner künstlerischen Wirksamkeit mit einem Portrait Schinkel’s und mit einem Facsimile seiner Handschrift. Berlin: Gropius, 1842;”Ueber den Pauperismus auch in der Kunst.” Kunstblatt 1845, No. 71; Ueber die Kunst als Gegenstand der Staatsverwaltung mit besonderem Bezuge auf die Verhältnisse des preußischen Staates. 1847

Sources

von Bülow, Gottfried. “Kugler, Franz Theodor von.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 17 (1883): 307-315; Treue, Wilhelm. “Franz Theodor Kugler: Kulturhistoriker und Kulturpolitiker.” Historische Zeitschrift 175, no. 3 (1953): 483-526; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 373, 530; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 89-90, 145, 157; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 228-30; Schwarzer, Mitchell. “Origins of the Art History Survey Text.” Art Journal 54 (Fall 1995): 24; Armi, C. Edson. “The Corbel Table.” Gesta 39, no. 2, [special issue:] ‘Robert Branner and the Gothic’ (2000): 89; Karlholm, Dan. Art of Illusion: the Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond. New York: Lang, 2006.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Kubler, George

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kubler, George

Other Names:

George Kubler

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1996

Place Born: Hollywood, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Place Died: Hamden, new Haven, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): anthropology, Caribbean, Central American, Pre-Columbian (American), and South American

Career(s): educators

Overview

Yale art historian of Pre-Columbian and Ibero-American Art; integrated non-European arts and anthropological aspects into the discipline of art history. Kuber was the son of German immigrant parents, Frederick William Kubler (1881-1920), an industrialist with a degree in art history from Munich, and Ellen Orloff-Beckmann (Kubler). After his father’s death when Kubler was eight, he moved with his mother to Europe where he studied in France and Switzerland. Following her death, Kubler attended Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, between 1925-1929. He returned to Europe where he studied in Germany (Berlin, 1931) and then in Munich, 1932-1933. Kubler was admitted to Yale University in the United States where he received his BA in 1934 and MA in 1936. After coursework for the doctorate at New York University, 1936-1938, and a marriage to Elizabeth Bushnell (b. 1912) in 1937, Kubler returned to Yale as a student of Henri Focillon in 1938 and as an instructor. His earliest interest was on the more traditional European research interests of Velasquez and Murillo. He received his Ph.D. in 1940, publishing his dissertation, The Religious Architecture in New Mexico the same year. From the first, Kubler showed himself to be a maverick. Church architecture in New Mexico had been more or less ignored by English-speaking art historians. His article “The Kuchua in the Colonial World,” an article on the presence of Peruvian indigenous tradition during Spanish rule, remains a staple for the anthropological study. In 1943 he translated his mentor’s theoretical tract as the Life of Forms in Art into English giving Focillon a new following among English readers. Kubler was visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1946. He was appointed professor at Yale in 1947. His second book, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, appeared in 1948. He chaired of department of art at Yale between 1953-1956. His Arquitectura de los siglos XVII-XVIII published for the respected Ars Hispaniae series in 1957, was subsequently translated in English, with an added section by Martin S. Soria in the equally important Pelican History of Art series as Baroque Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800 in 1959. Kubler’s attention then turned to Pre-Columbian art. In 1962, Kubler published two books on which his fame would thereafter rest. Art and Architecture of Ancient America, his second for the Pelican History of Art series, and The Shape of Time. In 1964 he was named Robert Lehman Professor of History of History of Art. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University, 1966-67. He was appointed Sterling Professor of the History of Art in 1975. Kubler retired from active teaching at Yale in 1983. He was appointed the 1985-86 Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C. Kubler wrote Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art in 1991, a thoughtful art historiography of the ancient America. Among his final presentations was a lecture on Focillon in 1995, published posthumously as “L’enseignement d’Henri Focillon.” His students included Robert Farris Thompson. The work of the Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully, Jr., was deeply affected by Kubler’s thought. Kubler was the foremost scholar of Pre-Columbian and Post-Columbian art of his generation and brought the area into consideration of the discipline of art history (Willey). The Shape of Time remains fundamental for the concept of art history as “material culture.” Kubler argued in it that art “can be expanded to embrace the whole range of [hu]man-made things.” But Kubler also controversially asserted in Shape of Time that “art stands outside culture” and warned about a linear-historical perspective that would interpret objects through historical precedent. History, Kubler contended, is a process that continually transforms human sensorial capacities and knowledge through ongoing discovery.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Religious Architecture of New Mexico. Yale University, 1940, published, The Religious Architecture of New Mexico in the Colonial Period and Since the American Occupation. Colorado Springs, CO: The Taylor Museum 1940; translated, with Hogan, Charles Beecher. Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942; Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948; Arquitectura de los siglos XVII-XVIII. Vol 14 of Ars Hispaniae. Madrid, 1957, partially translated into English as, and Soria, Martin. Baroque Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959; The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962; Art and Architecture of Ancient America. (Pelican History of Art, 21). Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962; The Iconography of Teotihuacán. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University, 1967; Studies in Classic Maya Iconography. Hamden, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1969; Building of the Escorial. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982; Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991; “L’enseignement d’Henri Focillon,” in, Relire Focillon: cycle de conférences organisé au musée du Louvre. Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1998.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 30-32, 42 mentioned, 51, 94, 31 n. 67; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 149; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 444, 455-456; [transcript] George Kubler and Elizabeth Kubler. 3 vols. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA, 1994; [obituaries:] Kimmelman, Michael. “George Kubler, 84, Pioneer In Study of Pre-Columbian Art.” New York Times October 5, 1996, p. 52; Yale Bulletin and Calendar 23 no. 10 (1996) http://www.yale.edu/opa/ybc/v25.n10.obit; Willey, Gordon R. “George Alexander Kubler (26 July 1912-3 October 1996).” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 4 (December 1998): 672-675.

Kubach, Hans Erich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kubach, Hans Erich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1909

Home Country/ies: Germany

Institution(s): Rhineland-Palatinate monument preservation

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Romanesque Architecture. New York, NY : Electa/Rizzoli, 1988.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Krubsacius, Friedrich August

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Krubsacius, Friedrich August

Other Names:

Friedrich August Krubsacius

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Architect who ideas on a history of art anticipate Winckelmann.

Sources

Justi, Carl. Winckelmann: sein Leben, Seine Werke und sein Zeitgenossen. Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1898, vol. 1, p. 287; Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. “Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of Art before Winckelmann.” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 no. 3 (July 2001): 539-540

Architect who ideas on a history of art anticipate Winckelmann.

Krönig, Wolfgang

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Krönig, Wolfgang

Gender: male

Date Born: 1904

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Institution(s): Universität zu Köln

Overview

Medievalist; wrote one of the volumes in the series on the Duomo of Monreale, following the volumes by Ernst Kitzinger on the mosaics in the Cathedral and that by Roberto Salvini on the capitals in the Cloister.

Selected Bibliography

The Cathedral of Monreale and Norman Architecture in Sicily. Palermo: S.F. Flaccovio, 1966.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Medievalist; wrote one of the volumes in the series on the Duomo of Monreale, following the volumes by Ernst Kitzinger on the mosaics in the Cathedral and that by Roberto Salvini on the capitals in

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