New Biography of Influential Scholar George A. Kubler

Art historian George A. Kubler (1912–1996) was a foundational scholar of ancient American art and archaeology as well as Spanish and Portuguese architecture.

Over the course of five decades at Yale University, he published 17 books that include innovative monographs, major works of synthesis, and an influential theoretical treatise. In this biography, Thomas F. Reese analyzes the early formation, broad career, and writings of Kubler, casting nuanced light on the origins and development of his thinking.

George A. Kubler and the Shape of Art History (Getty Research Institute, $60) is a revealing historical account and analysis of Kubler’s seminal work The Shape of Time—a book so influential to students, scholars, artists, and curious readers in multiple disciplines that it has been continuously in print since 1962. Reese reveals how pivotal its ideas were in Kubler’s own thinking, because rather than focusing on problems of form as an ordering principle, he increasingly arranged works by how they communicate meaning. The author demonstrates how Kubler, who professed to have little interest in theory, devoted himself to the craft of art history, discovering and charting the rules that guided the development of structure and significance through time.