Posing problems: George Kubler’s ‘prime objects’

ABSTRACT

In his seminal 1962 essay, The Shape of Time, the American art historian George Kubler described the production of art as a series of attempts to ‘solve’ a certain artistic ‘problem’. The origin of these ‘problems’ is located in epochal artworks that are called ‘prime objects’ by Kubler. This essay situates this explanation for artistic innovation in the tradition of art historiography, most notably Jacob Burckhardt whose writings bear striking similarities to Kubler’s concepts and might have even inspired the neologism ‘prime object’. However, I argue that Kubler’s notion of the problem-posing ‘prime object’ virtually inverts the meaning of the term as employed by his predecessor and turns it – contrary to his own claim to write a ‘history of things’ – into a concept that has in some respects more affinities with a neo-Romantic Platonism.

KEYWORDS:

• George Kubler
• Jacob Burckhardt
• art history
• historiography
• originality
• material culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hans Christian Hönes (Ph.D. Munich 2013) is a research associate at The Warburg Institute, London (‘Bilderfahrzeuge’ project). Recent book publications include: Kunst am Ursprung. Das Nachleben der Bilder und die Souveränität des Antiquars (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014) and (ed., together with Ulrich Pfisterer) Aby Warburg, Fragmente zur Ausdruckskunde (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2015).

Notes

1.

‘The anonymous mural painters of Herculaneum and Boscoreale connect with those of the seventeenth century and with Cezanne as successive stages separated by irregular intervals in a millenary study of the luminous structure of landscape, which probably will continue for many generations more upon equally unpredictable rhythms.’ Claude is also paired with Cézanne for another reason; both are described as ‘ruminative artists’ who were ‘slow-paced, patient painter[s]’ (Kubler 1962, 87).

2. Kubler (1962, 1) explicitly stated ‘that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things’.

3. ‘A historical style can be defined as the co-ordinated pattern of interrelations of individual expressions or executions in the same medium or art’ (Kroeber 1957, 32).

4. Exception: Pfisterer (2008, 209–210). Unconvincingly tracing it back in passing to Focillon: Ducci (2014, 81).

5. The only author discussing Kubler in relation to Burckhardt so far is Horst Janson, who irritatingly writes that Kubler would have missed to ‘take up Burckhardt’s challenge and view the history of art in terms of Aufgaben, or “tasks”’ (Janson 1982, 12).

6. ‘Although Kubler does not expressly limit his concept of problem solving to aspects of craft and technique, his concrete examples are nevertheless selected predominantly from these areas’ (Maupeu, Schankweiler, and Stallschus 2014, 31). Similar: Pfisterer (2008, 205).

7. ‘Wie sehr ist es überhaupt ein Glücksfall, wenn der primäre Meister entsteht und wenn er eine ganze Reihe von primären Werken schaffen kann […] wenn er sich der Nachwelt als ein beständig wachsender offenbaren kann wie Rafael’ (Burckhardt 2003, 390).

8. ‘Die Werke der Kunst werden jedoch nicht wegen der Lösung dieser Probleme geschaffen; die Probleme ergeben sich vielmehr, indem Werke geschaffen werden’ (Hauser 1958, 177). Burckhardt’s view, on the contrary, was adopted by authors like the Viennese art historian Pächt (1977) who understood the ‘solution’ of an artistic problem similarly as a quasi-religious duty of a predestined artist.

9. ‘Der Beschauer wird merkwürdig gestimmt gegen einen Künstler, dessen Größe ihm durchgängig imponirt und dessen Empfindungsweise doch so gänzlich von der seinigen abweicht […] die Subjectivität tritt hier in Gestalt eines absolut schrankenlosen Schaffens auf’ (Burckhardt 2001a, 539).