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Kubler, George. La configuración del tiempo: Observaciones sobre la historia de las cosas. Nueva edición ampliada [Spanish translation of The Shape of Time]. Introduction by Thomas F. Reese; trans. Jorge Luján Muñoz. Madrid: Editorial Nerea, 1988 (English version).

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Kubler noted in 1973 that he wrote The Shape of Time "to enlarge the scope of

what is embraced by the history of art very radically." "Widening the gate," "dropping

the screen," "opening things into each other," and causing the "collapse of boundaries"

were all goals he recognized. Kubler's strategy was to develop conceptual tools, or

better to define a formal structure which was universal enough to encompass the

enormous diversity of art and artists in all societies and cultures, especially those

seldom studied by Western art historians, where artists were frequently anonymous,

where distinctions between the fine and useful arts were seldom made, and where the

traditional tools of art history functioned poorly if at all, but which produced the majority

of all art yet made by man. The hope was to discover a versatile structure that would

allow him to weave many different patterns, but in a system in which all of the parts

complemented and supported one another.

His essential goal in writing The Shape of Time was to discover a flexible and all-

embracing system that could unite the diverse approaches within his own field

(technicists, connoisseurs, formalists, iconographers, social and cultural historians), and

also demonstrate similarities and differences between the history of art and other fields

(physics, mathematics, biology, geology, astronomy, linguistics, anthropology, literary

criticism, and philosophy). Although The Shape sought to enrich the history of art

through repeated references to ideas in the natural and social sciences that stressed its

interconnectedness with other disciplines, it also sought to define the uniqueness of the

history of art and obstinately refused to allow it to be subsumed under the metaphors

and methods of other disciplines or domains. Kubler was searching for an

"isomorpheme" (defined by L. S. Feuer as a paradigm, model, root idea, canonical

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form, world picture, views of nature, images, theoretical ideas, or unit ideas)1 that would

describe the Umwelt of man-made things, for man-made things obeyed a time distinct

from the Umwelten of matter, animals, or man. One had to pull back to an appropriate

viewing distance that would include all man-made things, but not so far back that all

realms appeared to be the same.

Kubler's broad vision of intellectual and artistic culture then approximated that of

Alfred Kroeber, for whom works of art and systems of knowledge evolved

independently, but which formed systems or configurations of interrelationships that

taken in their totality approximated historical reality. And also like Kroeber, Kubler gave

the work of art a highly privileged position in the scheme of things, emphasizing the

absolute primacy of artistic activity as a mode of sensing the universe. In a mutational

and indeterminate world, both scholars sensed that the artist might serve as a

fundamental indicator of these non-rational impulses towards change that guide the

course of history. As Kroeber had noted: Histories of art . . . promise to be of increasing importance in the comparative history of civilizations. Art expresses values. It deals with them perhaps more directly than any other cultural activity. This value system . . . is what holds the civilization together and comes nearest to summating it. That the arts should be one of the main expressions of this value system and perhaps its most sensitive index, is no wonder.2

The Shape of Time was written to help define the contours of this Umwelt.

European critics of the early seventies, like Andrei Boris Nakov and Giovanni

Previtali who edited French and Italian translations of the book, praised the fullness and

1Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 325-42. In Feuer's usage, it is central that the theoretical idea be fertile. In other words, the relational structures that it sets forward must be replicated in various independent domains and the patterns that it sets must be invariant through repeated uses of the analogy. 2A. L. Kroeber, An Anthropologist Looks at History, ed. Theodora Kroeber (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p. 16.

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inclusivist stance of the book, heralding its attack on elitist and exclusivist

methodologies and its plea for the inclusion of such things as tools, material culture, folk

art, and the art of the "Third World." For them, Kubler's roots were in Russian

formalism, Prague School semiotics, and the more scientific disciplines of the

humanities, most notably anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. Although Nakov

emphasized its "attitude formelle-matérialiste" and its "ordre objectal," while Previtali

interpreted Kubler's ideas about clusters of form-problems in given works of art and

differences in systematic age as "competing" systems and a natural entrance for

Marxist interpreters, The Shape of Time was for both of them a crucial, liberating work.

Although surprisingly, there were art historians who believed the book took an

exclusivist stance. After all, Kubler's view rested on two tenets: the approach should be

inclusive and it should explain the specific nature, and primacy, of art making and the

work of art in the scheme of things. Therefore, The Shape of Time had questioned (1)

all approaches which were limited, or limited themselves, to the analysis of only one

aspect of the work of art to the exclusion of others (connoisseurs, iconographers,

biographers, "mere formalists," rhapsodists, and elitists of all kinds), and (2) any

deterministic methodology which relegated art to the position of being a "product" or

"illustration" of forces external to itself, whether social, economic, intellectual, or other

cultural factors or Zeitgeist. Monism, extrinsic determinism, and normative aesthetics

were all severely criticized, and when The Shape was published some members of the

profession felt their own kinds of art inquiry were underplayed and that the book

narrowed, not expanded, the ways in which works of art should be approached. Some

misconstrued Kubler's precisely formulated objections to the restrictive character of

certain approaches as blanket condemnations, and stripped his central metaphors of

the many concurrent, supportive, and protective systems which he had woven around

them. Indeed, even admirers like Bialostocki described The Shape--which opposed all

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nomothetic assertions--as a search for the "laws that governed man-made things."3

Although Kubler perhaps believed that the study of change could help reveal general

patterns, The Shape was, as Colt noted: "mainly concerned . . . with the problems of

describing change rather than with explaining it."4 The ironic result of these facts was

that many art historians overlooked its calls for pluralism, polyvalency, and

antideterministic approaches, and believed it to be a formalistic and deterministic

treatise.

In addition to the two guiding tenets already noted, two fundamental qualities of

The Shape deserve note. They concern its preparation and its style. First, Kubler wrote

the book on the basis of what he knew and what he learned in the preparation of his first

six major books. Its ideas were a product of empirical induction--not theoretical

abstraction. As Kubler later wrote to me when queried for a reading list: "I've never

`done' the topic systematically, and dredged out my position from what I `knew' more

than from what I `read'."

Second, Kubler's style was terse, epigrammatic, and rich in metaphors--never

discursive, philosophical, or prosaic. As he once quipped about Marshall McLuhan

during an interview: We seem to share an impulse to communicate by the aphorism, by the epigram. It's certainly true that people will more readily read something that is aphoristic than something that is sustained philosophical

3Jan Bialostocki, review of The Shape of Time in Art Bulletin, XLVII, 1 (March 1965), 135-39. Indeed, it is significant that when an interviewer who was fascinated by Kubler's remarks on recurrent rhythms and generational theory asked Kubler about them in 1973, he commented that they were the parts with which he was least satisfied, being too "anthropological" [See Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed. Thomas F. Reese (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 413-17. Hereafter abbreviated as Essays.]. 4Priscilla Colt, review of Kubler's The Shape of Time, The Art Journal, XXIII, 1 (1963), 79.

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exposition--which I am incapable of writing, at any rate.5

The metaphors are certainly among the most memorable devices of The Shape of

Time. In Kubler's hands, they became a technique of discovery. By critically examining

the metaphors traditionally used by investigators in different fields to describe events,

change, development, and time, Kubler was able to assess their appropriateness and to

chart the similarities and differences between art, history, biology, physics,

mathematics, and other realms. Metaphors allowed him to stress the connections

among things and to define the absolute uniqueness of art, art- making, and art history--

all without suggesting that any two fields were identical.

Although Kubler wrote the book, not from what he read, but from what he knew,

what he knew was not without identifiable sources. Henri Focillon's La Vie des formes

(1934) is usually acknowledged as a major inspiration, but Henri Bergson's Essai sur les

données immediates de la conscience (1889), Pierre Lecomte du Nîuy's Biological Time

(1936), Alfred Kroeber's Configurations of Culture Growth (1944) and Style and

Civilizations (1957), and numerous lesser studies of topology, mathematics, physics,

astronomy, cytology, genetics, biology, and linguistics were also influential--even if

Kubler frequently rejected many of their principal tenets.

Kubler has emphasized repeatedly the importance of Focillon's influence on his

thought, and each time its importance struck him with greater force. Kubler's

introduction to The Life of Forms (1942),6 his obituary notice for College Art Journal

(1945),7 his "History--or Anthropology--of Art" (1975),8 his "reminiscences" for Carroll

5"A Talk with George Kubler" [an interview with Robert Joseph Horvitz], Kubler, Essays, p. 414. 6Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler, Yale Historical Publications, History of Art, IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942). [2nd enl. ed. New York: Wittenborn-Schultz, 1948.] 7Kubler, "Henri Focillon, 1881-1943," in Kubler, Essays, pp. 378-80. 8Kubler, "History--or Anthropology--of Art?" in Kubler, Essays, pp. 406-12.

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Meeks (1967)9 and Sumner Crosby (1976),10 and "The Teaching of Henri Focillon"

(1981) describe it, but none more eloquently and concisely than the last: Taken together, the Life of Forms and the lectures [delivered in 1940 to the departmental faculty at Yale] define a theory of art, as well as instructions for research and instruction in the history of art. The theory is morphological, mapping the entire formal domain, and exploring its position in space, in matter, in the mind, and in time. The lectures, on the other hand, are concerned with teaching historical method among artistic phenomena. These are set in relation to natural, ethnic, sociological, and economic data, which are all reciprocally affected in turn by the existence of works of art generating changes in perception. As to time in the lectures, the dates to be considered are both textual and by analogy. Variable durations and historical distances enter the questions. Evolutions are merely intervals between dates. Facts and events are different. Historical time differs from time of works of art. Every age takes color from some preceding equivalent. Geographical traditions are less fundamental than innate differences among families of minds. As to style, works of art have autonomous character, being generated by a state of conscience, which is defined by the choice of certain specific forms. Tradition, influence, and experiment are the critical phases of the history of style. Various styles may coexist at the same place and in the same moment. Various `states' of styles (experimental, classic, refinement, academic, baroque) are not necessarily sequential, but may coexist. Architecture, sculpture, and painting mark out the boundaries of visual works of art. For each of these arts, a different model of study is proposed, whereby its essential natures may be surveyed. His topics included all visual art, from cities and landscapes to industrial and decorative art, and from fine arts to the material culture of anthropology. Nothing artists do escapes this grid: it pertains to the whole world of visible artifacts. Thus Focillon's morphological method purports to analyze the visible

9Kubler, "Carroll Meeks," Eye: Yale Arts Association, New Haven, 1 (1967), 6-7. 10Kubler, "Sumner Crosby. I: New Haven," Gesta: Essays in Honor of Sumner McKnight Crosby (special issue), XV, 1-2 (1976), 5-6.

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structure on arrangements of the work of art, in order to correlate perception with organization. Such formalism was the dominant current in Focillon's decade at Yale. It was not at all the appreciative formalism of Roger Fry, but closer to the rigorous morphology of structuralism and semiology, which were yet to find their names and prophets after 1945.11

The Shape of Time was a critique, extension, and reaffirmation of those ideas, all in

one.

Kubler had applied most of the ideas in Focillon's three middle chapters (e.g.

"Forms in the Realms of Space, Matter, and Mind") in his architectural studies,12 and,

after his experience in writing the major survey books of the fifties,13 he returned to

chapter 1, "The World of Forms" (pp. 1-15), and chapter V, "Forms in the Realm of

Time" (pp. 53-74), as sources of inspiration.

Focillon's opening paragraph captured the major themes and the emotional

vision that guided The Life of Forms: A work of art is an attempt to express something that is unique . . . . But it is likewise an integral part of a system of highly complex relationships. . . . flowing together within it the energies of many civilizations may be plainly discerned.14 The formal relationships with a work of art and among different works of art constitute an order for, and a metaphor of, the entire universe15

11Kubler, Essays, pp. 381-85. 12Kubler, The Religious Architecture of New Mexico in the Colonial Period and since the American Occupation (Colorado Springs: The Taylor Museum, 1940), and Sixteenth Century Mexican Architecture, 2 vols., Yale Historical Publications, History of Art, V (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). 13Kubler, Arquitectura de los siglos XVII y XVIII, Ars Hispaniae, XIV (Madrid: Plus Ultra, 1957); [with Martin Soria] Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions, 1500-1800, Pelican History of Art (Baltimore and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959); and The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya, and Andean Peoples, Pelican History of Art (Baltimore and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962). 14Focillon, 1948, p. 1. 15Ibid., p. 2.

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Plastic forms are subjected to the principle of metamorphoses, by which they are perpetually renewed, as well as to the principle of styles, by which their relationship is, although by no means with any regularity of recurrence, first tested, then made fast, and finally disrupted. . . . it is born of change, and it leads on to other changes. . . . A score of experiments, be they recent or forthcoming, are invariably interwoven behind the well-defined evidence of the image.16 . . . a style . . . is . . . a closely related sequence and succession.17

And the following excerpts from chapter V capture some of his ideas about the

dynamics of forms in the realm of time: History is not unilinear; it is not pure sequence. . . . From the fact that various modes of action are contemporaneous . . . it does not follow that they all stand at an equal point in their development. . . . Each order of action obeys its own impulse--one that is determined by internal exigencies, and retarded or accelerated by external contacts. . . . The history of art displays, juxtaposed within the very same moment, survivals and anticipations, and slow, outmoded forms that are the contemporaries of bold and rapid forms.18

These ideas were deeply rooted in two of the artistic domains that Focillon most loved:

printmaking and medieval architecture. The role of the interaction of material and

technique in the process of creation was learned in his father's printmaking atelier, and

the importance of sequence and seriation was derived from the principles of French

archaeological method. These ideas furnished the base for one of Kubler's central

hypotheses in The Shape of Time: works of art are purposeful solutions to problems,

and various solutions are revealed in formal sequences.

Focillon's and Kubler's shared interest in the anonymous architecture of medieval

France had a fundamental, and often unrecognized, impact on their visions of art.

Indeed, the structural models which most pervasively and completely illustrate their

16Ibid., p. 6. 17Ibid., p. 7. 18Ibid., p. 55.

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theoretical statements are the great Romanesque and Gothic churches studied by

Focillon and their Mexican and New Mexican descendants studied by Kubler. The

harmonic orchestration of the numerous technical and aesthetic problems faced by the

builders of a Gothic cathedral became a paradigm--an essential epistemological and

structural model--for the genesis of the work of art. A comparison between an example

cited by Kubler in The Shape of Time and his central metaphor makes this clear. The

example: . . .single things are extremely complicated entities, so complicated that we can pretend to understand them only by generalizing about them. One way out is frankly to accept the complexity of single things.19 At Mantes cathedral . . . the architect . . . wanted a formal value toward which technical solutions could help him. The volume of the interior is uninterrupted, yet the mass of the facade is immense. Both objectives have been brought to a close fit, however inconsistent they may have seemed in the first place. This solution in Gothic cathedral architecture implicated a cluster of subordinate traits such as columns, buttresses, and windows, whose further alteration was governed by the facade solution. The facade solution was itself subordinate to another system of changes respecting the composition of the towers.20

The central metaphor: . . . a formal sequence . . . is . . . a historical network of gradually altered repetitions of the same trait. . . . In cross section let us say that it shows a network, a mesh, or a cluster of subordinate traits; and in long section that it has a fiber-like structure of temporal stages, all recognizably similar, yet altering in their mesh from beginning to end.21 . . . we can imagine the flow of time as assuming the shapes of fibrous bundles . . . , with each fiber corresponding to a need upon a particular theater of action, and the lengths of the fibers varying as to the duration of each need and the solution to its problems. The culture bundles therefore

19Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 36. 20Ibid., p. 37. 21Ibid., pp. 37-38.

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consist of variegated fibrous lengths of happening, mostly long, and many brief. They are juxtaposed largely by chance, and rarely by conscious forethought or rigorous planning.22

This concept of architecture derived, via Focillon, from the French archaeological

methods pioneered by Arcisse de Caumont and Viollet-le-Duc.

But The Shape of Time was radically different from The Life of Forms in several

essential ways. Most notably, Kubler purged Focillon's ideas of their Bergsonian

elements, replaced his biological metaphors with others drawn from mathematics and

the physical sciences, substituted his lingering idealism and spiritualism with positivist

and naturalistic explanations, and supplanted his fluid, fusing, and interpenetrating

continuities with more particulate notions derived from quantum physics.

The works of Bergson, Focillon, and Kubler form an interesting dialectic

progression. Following Bergson, who had broken from the positivist metaphysics of

Comte, Spencer, and Taine, and from the sociological theories of Durkheim, Focillon

rejected the mechanical determinism of Taine (who emphasized race, environment, and

moment), the materialism of Semper (who emphasized function, material, and

technique), and the scientism still inherent in most French archaeological method. At

the same time, however, Focillon wanted to mediate between the materialism of

Semper's ideas about material and technique and the idealism of Bergson and of

Riegl's and Viennese Kunstwissenschaft, so he resolved the polarities between matter

and mind, between body and spirit, by emphasizing not Kunstwollen, but the

interactions between mind, technique, and matter. For these reasons, The Life of

Forms would preserve traces both of (1) Bergsonian ideas, which emphasized instinct,

intuition, freedom, unpredictability, and transrational truths, and (2) the determinism,

materialism, and scientism that Bergson had rejected. They were a product of the

compromise that sought to bring the pendulum back to the center. 22Ibid., p. 122.

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Focillon's treatise must be understood in light of world events at the moment it

was written. It was a profoundly idealistic affirmation of the freedom of the artistic will

and of the power of the personal creative act at a moment of economic and political

crises that witnessed economic depression and the rise of Fascism. For Focillon, the

process of creation was located in the nexus of mind, material, and technique, in a

realm where artists were able to overcome the limitations of circumstance, environment,

and material condition. The Life of Forms was an affirmation of the uniqueness of art

and a manifesto of artistic freedom. It provided spiritual sustenance and inspiration, not

merely some explanatory system, and that essential spirit was one of Focillon's primary

legacies to George Kubler.

Focillon's rich prose style, which Kubler was to transform into a stylistic form

more appetizing to Anglo-Saxon audiences, closely mirrored his message. But critics

frequently misunderstand that Gallic prose style. The traditional criticism is that it

sacrificed clarity of statement for rich poetic metaphors, but the criticism misses the

point. Focillon's choice of a stylistic expression that was more poetic than philosophical

and more evocative than precise was not an error or rhetorical judgment, but rather a

conscious attempt to approximate the very qualities which he believed inherent in the

nature of art, where the mystery of creation was irreducible and could be located only by

intuition.

It was here that Focillon's Bergsonian bent was most evident. The fluid and

continuous dialogue and the poetic and evocative prose released the reader from

obligations of strict definition and the testing of hypotheses, while the animation and

personification of forms and styles allowed him to assume the more passive role of an

observer of a system which unfolded by itself. Everything is flow and change as ideas

and sentences interact, interpenetrate, and dissolve one into the other, and the primary

actors evaporate as one attempts to capture them.

Focillon did for form and style what Bergson did for time and duration; he

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liberated them from the mechanical bonds artificially imposed on them by man. He

accomplished this in part by personifying them and giving them a life of their own: . . . forms comply with an internal, organizing logic. . . . a logical process that already exists . . . within the styles themselves.23 Forms obey their own rules . . . .24 Style is seeking to define itself . . . .25

And underlying, but not dominating, all is the collective spirit: in certain realms of art . . . individual effort yields more readily to tradition and to the collective spirit.26

Few of these Bergsonian qualities survived in The Shape of Time.

Kubler criticized, modified, extended, and rebuilt Focillon's inspiring poetic

dialogues into a much more systematic and unified edifice of thought. While Focillon

leaned towards idealism and intuitive knowledge, Kubler favored a more naturalistic and

positivist explanatory system --although one lacking neither mystery nor indeterminacy.

While Focillon placed creativity in the synaptic spaces between mind, matter, and

technique, Kubler preferred the more positivist realm of problem solving. While Focillon

embraced metaphors drawn from biology, Kubler drew his from mathematics and the

physical sciences. While Focillon adopted the dynamic, synthetic, intuitive, and future-

inceptive aesthetic time of Bergson, Kubler moved towards the dynamic, analytic,

logistical, and past-perfective technological time of atomic theory.27 While Focillon's

23Focillon, p. 8. 24Ibid., p. 10. 25Ibid., p. 11. 26Ibid., p. 57. 27These categories of temporal expression are drawn from Robert S. Brumbaugh, "Metaphysical Presuppositions and the Study of Time," in The Study of Time III, pp. 1-21.

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prose was evocative, suggestive, and abstract, Kubler's was clear, logical, and

concrete. He transformed the poetic metaphors of Focillon's book into concrete working

models of the matrix in which the work of art and the artists were located. History,

classing, propagation, and duration were his categories: they might serve equally well a

biologist, anthropologist, or geologist.

While Focillon's book must be sensed and felt, Kubler's system could be directly

visualized and used. These qualities are due largely to Kubler's total transformation of

Focillon's prose style. He replaced prolixity with terseness, flow with separation,

irresolution with relative clarity, fusion with classification, abstraction with concrete form,

interpenetrating metamorphoses with quantum leaps, allegorical animation with

descriptive analysis, familiar loaded words with neologisms, and poetic verse with

laconic prose.

Focillon's work with its emphasis on uniqueness, inventiveness, and the open-

minded nature of the system gave life and nourished Kubler's book; but the American

scholar's experience, environment, and instincts led him to swing the pendulum much

further back towards naturalism and positivism than the French master was willing or

able to do.

What were the forces and who were the figures that affected these

transformations? Certainly Kubler's studies of the social and behavioral sciences, and,

in particular, the work of the American anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960)

deserve special note. Although not a student, Kubler began a correspondence with

Kroeber in 1938 that inspired a deep admiration for Kroeber and his work. Their

spiritual kinship was of the most intense kind, and, without denying the many concrete

influences of Kroeber on Kubler, that kinship probably depended as much on

experimental and spiritual affinities as on direct-line transmissions.

Both were scholars of broad professional and interdisciplinary interests who

shared deep concerns with methodology and theory. Both were empiricists who

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rejected all a priori generalizations and who wrote from what they knew--knowledge

gained only after many years of primary fieldwork. Both were historians and humanists

in fields where such stances countered the prevailing tendencies of the moment. And

both distinguished themselves sharply from the natural scientists who isolated

phenomena to discover causes and effects.

Both were interested in "behavior" or the "products of behavior"--not causes and

effects; both shared an impulse to communicate by metaphor and analogy; and both

dedicated themselves to a continuous search for "formulas" that would help describe

the particular historical phenomenon at hand, and "patterns," that would indicate how

"culture" works.

Both were cultural relativists for whom the search for patterns was never a

search for laws. For them, there were no universal laws: nothing was cyclical, regularly

repetitive, or necessary. As Kroeber noted: "All historical events possess individuality or

uniqueness, while occurring in an interconnected continuum." Here, Bergson, Kroeber,

Focillon, and Kubler all would have concurred. What differed was the prey each wished

to capture: time, culture, and art.28

Kubler critically analyzes Kroeber's contributions in a forthcoming book on the

aesthetic recognition of ancient American art, where he distinguishes between

Kroeber's historical position and his own in 1988. He writes of Kroeber's late work:

Kroeber's writing after 1940 spiraled outward to cover all cultures . . . . California and Peru yielded to an encyclopedic search for the phenomena and processes of his anthropological concept of culture. But he never examined the esthetic assumptions on which that concept depends, evading them by the substitution of style as a descriptive scheme or index for civilizations. Thus esthetic values safely became end-product in the main business of "culture history," rather than initial conditions at the beginning of human time. He saw "culture" as "organic"

28Niels Bohr and other quantum physicists following 1900 also shared all of these concerns.

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and "superorganic," not looking behind or under "culture."29

Kroeber's early studies of Peruvian ceramics, linguistics, and culture "elements"

and "areas" had influenced Kubler's methods in The Religious Architecture of New

Mexico and Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, but Configurations of

Culture Growth (1944) and Style and Civilizations (1957) were more important for The

Shape of Time. Kroeber's--and it should be added, Malinowski's--structural model of

culture provided a strong stimulus to Kubler's emerging ideas about the nature of art

and its relationship to other coexisting structural matrices.

Kroeber's concepts of culture that influenced Kubler can be summarized as

follows. Each culture emphasized specific bands in the total spectrum of possibilities,

but each changed in its own ways. Hence, cultures could not flow through time as

integrated wholes. Lists of cultural elements could best describe them. These formed

patterns whose configurations could be investigated in both time and space. The study

of both spatial distribution and sequential development were therefore fundamental

modes of analysis. "Styles," "patterns," and "growth configurations" became the subject

matter: pattern formation, pattern preservers, and pattern wreckers; saturation and

exhaustion; correlations between size and duration ("a greater pattern takes longer to fill

and exhaust"); growth typologies ("retarded," "insular," and "peripheral" growths);

qualitative differentials between "reality culture" (science and technology, which are

accumulative) and "value culture" (art and morality, which develop in pulses); the

relationships between geniuses and cultural climaxes (genius is defined as potential

given by high points of civilization); differentials between different cultural and artistic

realms; the stages of pattern development, and the question of cultural death.

Julian Steward has noted that Kroeber constantly saw changes in styles as flows and continua, pulses,

29Kubler, "The Esthetic Recognition of Ancient American Art" [unpublished manuscript].

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culminations, and diminutions, convergences and divergences, divisions, blends, and crosscurrents by which cultures develop and mutually influence one another.30

Such a Bergsonian vocabulary, no doubt, provided a natural entrance to a Focillon

disciple, even had Kubler not felt an equally strong appeal from Kroeber's more

particulate, analytical, and quantifiable model of culture. Kubler's ideas about genius,

the role of the individual artist, retention and discard, regularities and patterns, the

differences between science and art, and his basic metaphor of the work of art as a

"fibrous bundle" of many different problems or elements at different stages of

development owe much to Kroeber and his thought.

Until now, we have described the relationship of The Shape to its forebears, and

not without considerable obfuscation of its own unique qualities. The latter, I believe,

are best emphasized by studying its position in another dynamic chain--not that of its

influence on others, but of Kubler's own subsequent development of its conceptual

framework.

Like every work, The Shape occupied a dual position in Kubler's thought: one

retrospective that aimed at a summation of his past experiences as an historian, and

another future-inceptive that provided stimulation for reflection, change, and new

thoughts. I have emphasized its position at the end of a dual sequence: one internal

(Kubler's own research) and another external ( the writings of Bergson, Focillon, and

Kroeber), but it also was a gateway to the future since Kubler was repeatedly called

upon to "remark on" or "revisit" The Shape. Many of these articles help clarify the

positions taken in his book and his development after he wrote it, and they should be

considered together.

The strong critical reception of The Shape of Time, which crossed both national 30Julian H. Steward, "Alfred Louis Kroeber 1876-1960," in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, Vol. 36 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 206.

18

and disciplinary boundaries,31 probably explains the fact that he has never been able to

leave it completely behind him. It put him in the position of speaking for art historians in

studio-oriented periodicals like Perspecta, Art News, and Artforum, and for the arts and

humanities in journals like Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Current Anthropology,

Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Annals of the New York Academy of

Sciences, all addressed to scholars in other disciplines.

These papers, articles, and interviews, which recorded the development of

Kubler's thoughts about art, history, style, and time after The Shape, can be considered

in three general groups: (1) "Style and the Representation of Historical Time" (1967),32

"Comment on Vanguard Art" (1969),33 "A Talk with George Kubler" (1973)34, and

"Towards a Reductive Theory of Visual Style" (1979)35 extended or modified ideas set

forth in The Shape; (2) "Period, Style, and Meaning in Ancient American Art" (1970)36

and "History--or Anthropology--of Art?" (1975)37 reconsidered concerns and figurative

modes used in The Religious Architecture of New Mexico and Sixteenth Century

Mexican Architecture, and The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican,

Maya, and Andean Peoples; and (3) "Disjunction and Mutational Energy" (1961),38

"Science and Humanism among Americanists" (1973),39 and "Renascence and

31The Shape of Time has been translated into German, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic. 32Kubler, Essays, pp. 386-90. 33Ibid., pp. 391-94. 34Ibid., pp. 413-17. 35Ibid., pp. 418-23. 36Ibid., pp. 395-405. 37Ibid., pp. 406-12. 38[review of E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art] Art News, LIX, 10 (1961), 34 and 55. 39In The Iconography of Middle American Sculpture (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973), pp. 163-167.

19

Disjunction in the Art of Meso-American Antiquity" (1977)40 elevated Panofsky's

diachronic analysis of disjunctions between form and meaning in Renaissance and

Renascences in Western Art (1960) to the status of a new paradigm for historical

research. The first two refined previous positions; the third represented a major change

of emphasis.

Only the first group, which contains Kubler's most abstract and philosophical

works, can be discussed in this short introduction. These papers represented Kubler's

new awareness of the universal significance of the subjects with which he had dealt

more spontaneously in The Shape. They address such fundamental issues as the

historian's commitment, the nature of duration, the limitations of style, and the

differences between the sciences and the arts and humanities.

"Style and the Representation of Historical Time," delivered to the New York

Academy of Sciences' Conference on Time in 1966, was Kubler's first such paper after

completion of The Shape. It addressed three fundamental problems that continued to

fascinate him: (1) resemblances between the writing of history and the painting of

pictures, (2) the nature of duration, and (3) the limits of style. Each is treated separately

and each evolves into subsequent articles, so we will follow the development of each

theme.

The first part of his paper dealt with the historian's problems of selection and

figuration. The Shape of Time had grown directly out of problems of figuration posed in

the introduction to Ancient America: The aim of the historian . . . is to portray time . . . He transposes, reduces, composes, and colors a facsimile, like a painter, who in his search for the identity of the subject, must discover a patterned set of properties that will elicit recognition all while conveying a new perception

40Kubler, Essays, pp. 351-60.

20

of the subject.41

In his text, Kubler expanded this idea--that the historian's goal, like that of the painter, is

the discovery of mimetic schemes of representation--by defining some of the antithetical

choices that the historian faces as he confronts (1) the problem of selection: unique-

general, narrative-statistical, biographical-categorical, quantitative-qualitative,

synchronous-diachronic, synthetic-analytic, artificial periods-actual duration, and (2) the

problem of figuration: latent possibilities-explicit actualities, cause and effect-conditions

and events, abstraction-illusion and figure dominance-ground dominance.

Built on fertile analogies, they affirm in terse poetic sentences the conviction that

the writing of history is not an objective search for universal truths and nomothetic

axioms, but a subjective, intuitive, and relativistic act of figuration. It was a manifesto of

Kubler's "aesthetic" position as an historian.

The second part of his paper dealt with duration. The uncited point of departure

was Bergson's objection to spatial metaphors to describe duration: Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.42 [Succession is] a mutual penetration, an interconnexon and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought.43 . . . pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number . . . .44

41Kubler, The Shape of Time, p. 12. 42Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd; New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1971), p. 100. 43Ibid., p. 101. 44Ibid., p. 104.

21

In other words, all measurable time is artificial because it depends upon the intrusion of

space into the realm of pure duration. Time is a quality ("the multiplicity of

interpenetration"), not a quantity ("the multiplicity of juxtaposition"). A moment of time

cannot persist in order to be added to another, and one should not confuse duration

with extensity, succession with simultaneity, or quality with quantity.

Furthermore, the spatialization of durations externalizes them in relation to one another . . . thinking of their radical distinctness (the one having ceased to be when the other appears on the scene), it perceives them under the form of a discrete multiplicity, which amounts to setting them out in line, in the space in which each of them existed separately.45

Although Bergson's ideas came under serious attack following the rise of quantum

theory and the general acceptance of Einstein's theories of a space-time continuum,

these central issues in Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889)--and reflected in Focillon's

The Life of Forms (1934)--were not ones that Kubler felt could be easily dismissed.

They were a riddle with which every historian had to come to terms, and they were to

haunt him for many years.

As Kubler's title for The Shape of Time indicated, his book leaned more towards

the "multiplicity of juxtaposition" than to the "multiplicity of interpenetration," committing

the Bergsonian sin of expressing: duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus taken takes the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another.46

At the New York conference, Kubler proposed five aphoristic axioms about duration,

designed to challenge Bergson's assertions. Defining duration as "sequence among

actions of the same class," Kubler concluded:

45Ibid., p. 121. 46Ibid., p. 101.

22

Duration thus consists of distinct actions which resist classification, because each action differs from every other action in the microstructure of happening as to time, place, and agent. Yet the large-scale classing of actions is continually needed for activity to seem to have purpose.47

Kubler's faith in these axioms was still unshaken in 1979, when he stripped them of their

gaming, riddle-like qualities and rich explanations, reduced them to three, and elevated

them to the status of postulates in "Towards a Reductive Theory of Visual Style."48

Kubler's axioms provide us with an unexpected insight into the question of the

nature of the differences that separated his vision from those of his French

predecessors. Influenced by Bergson, Focillon had written, in Kubler's words, one of

the "boldest and most poetic affirmation[s] of a biological conception of the nature of the

history of art."49 But Kubler--deeply troubled by those metaphors--posed this question: . . . one asks whether artifacts do not possess a specific sort of duration, occupying time differently from the animal beings of biology and the natural materials of physics.50

The Shape of Time, in its attempt to define the nature of these durations, pointed

out many fundamental differences between biological time and historical time:

47"Style and Representation of Historical Time," in Kubler, Essays, p. 388. 48Ibid., pp. 418-23. The controversy between the two positions is perhaps an artificial one, fueled by the differences in purpose of Bergson, whose goal was to define the nature of time, and Kubler, whose goal was to portray events in time. Bergson was attempting to define the special logic that presides over evolution and artistic creation. Paul Turner Brumbaugh, in "Metaphysical Presuppositions and the Study of Time," has defined that process as "poiesis," which he contrasts with "analysis," the major tool of the historian. Poiesis is future inceptive, moving in the same direction as evolution and adducing destinations. Analysis is deductive, moving from later events to earlier ones. Since analysis deals with the past, and the past is fixed, one can employ spatial metaphors, which would be inappropriate in poiesis. 49Kubler, The Shape of Time, p. 32. 50Ibid., p. 83.

23

Biological time consists of uninterrupted durations of statistically predictable lengths: each organism exists from birth to death upon an `expected' life-span. Historical time, however, is intermittent and variable. Every action is more intermittent than it is continuous, and the intervals between actions are infinitely variable in duration and content. . . . Events and the intervals between them are the elements of the patterning of historical time. Biological time contains the unbroken events called lives; it also contains social organizations by species and groups of species, but in biology the intervals of time between events are disregarded . . . .51

Although Kubler occasionally allowed a biological analogy with genetics (e.g.

mutant genes or speciation) and cytology (e.g. systematic age), he preferred metaphors

drawn from mathematics and the physical sciences. The languages of electrodynamics,

astronomy, and physics especially attracted him, especially if we are dealing in art with the transmission of some kind of energy; with impulses, generating centers, and relay points; with increments and losses in transit; with resistances and transformers in the circuit.52

and by the language of measurement without numbers: The mathematical analogy for our study is topology, the geometry of relationships without magnitudes or dimensions . . . .53

Although Kubler renounced in The Shape the "evenly granular duration as the physicists

suppose for natural time," his statements revealed close, if then still undiscovered,

affinities with the analytical visions of quantum physicists: Every action is more intermittent that it is continuous . . . .54 The method imposed by such considerations is analytical and divisive rather than synthetic.

Quantum physics conceives of matter as a succession of units, each intact and isolated,

51Ibid., p. 13. 52Ibid., p. 9. 53Ibid., p. 34. 54Ibid., p. 13.

24

and recognizes separate sequential moments. The emphasis is one the parts,

differences, and discontinuities, not the wholes, similarities, and continuities of

Bergsonian thought.

But if Kubler accepted physical science metaphors with extreme caution in The

Shape, he continued to explore their appropriateness in subsequent years, shaping new

and more precise ideas about the nature of the time that governs man-made things.

They ultimately led him to recast his ideas about the history of things.

The new ideas are most evident in the range and subjects that Kubler chose for

investigation. In Kubler's pre-1960 books, continuities and the longue durée were

prominent, having a kinship with the long durations of astronomy, geology, and biology

in The Shape. After 1960, antithesis (complementary paired concepts like form-

meaning, style-duration, fine-plain, art-science, renascence-disjunction, technique-

format, signage-modus, period-sequence), discontinuities ("Renascence and

Disjunction"), boundaries ("Period, Style, and Meaning"), arrested synchronic moments

of creation ("Towards a Reductive Theory of Visual Style"), and individuality and the

microscopic examination of single works of art ("tissues and cells" in Building the

Escorial55; "bricolage" in Da Costa's treatise56; "disjunctions at transfer points" in Maya

sculpture and ceramics) moved to the foreground in his scholarship.

Increasingly after 1960, Kubler studied "individual forms" and "arrested

moments," even at the risk of shifting the focus of attention away from his portrayal of

sequence and motion. The changes to highly focused frames and extremely fast

shutter speeds were influenced by both iconography and quantum physics.

55Kubler, Building the Escorial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 56Felix da Costa, The Antiquity of the Art of Painting, introd. and notes by George Kubler, trans. George Kubler, George L. Hersey, Robert F. Thompson, Nancy G. Thompson, and Catherine Wilkinson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967).

25

First, iconography. In a searching review of The Shape, Jan Bialostocki

defended his own approach to the history of art by stressing the synchronic and

discontinuous nature of iconography: "Iconology" deals chiefly with individual works of art. "History of things" deals with sequences, the solving of problems, with prime objects and replications. Iconology tries to find how the unique meaning is expressed through the unique form in a selected work. For the "history of things," one work is of little interest . . . .57

Although Kubler would always prefer the more diachronic iconography of Panofsky to

that described by Bialostocki, his remarks proved prophetic. As Kubler moved more

and more towards iconographical studies, his works increasingly focused on individual

works of art arrested in time.

Second, quantum physics. Kubler's readings on Niels Bohr and the birth of

quantum description--where parallel problems of figuration had been faced forty to fifty

years earlier--also had a profound impact. Gerald Holton's "The Roots of

Complementarity," published in Daedalus in 1970, provided the spark. In that same

year, Kubler invoked Bohr's concept of "complementarity" in "Science and

Humanism"58 to resolve the conflict between the rival claims of anthropology and art

history. He repeated it in "Period, Style, and Meaning," "History--or Anthropology--of

Art," "Renascence and Disjunction," and "Towards a Reductive Theory of Visual Style."

The concept of "complementarity" and the question of why it provided such vital

stimulation to Kubler's thought require some explanation.59

Continuities underlie classical descriptions where coordinates like time, space,

57Bialostocki, p. 138. 58Kubler, "Science and Humanism among Americanists," in The Iconography of Middle American Sculpture, pp. 163-67 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973). 59Two very accessible discussions of these issues are presented by Feuer in Einstein and the Generations of Science and Gerald Holton in "The Roots of Complementarity," Daedalus, XCIX (1970), 1018-55. This text draws heavily on both.

26

energy, and momentum are considered as infinitely divisible. Discontinuities and

discreteness underlie Plank's quantum postulate according to which energy exchanges

proceed discontinuously in discrete steps of finite size. In quantum descriptions,

minimal amounts of time, space, and change exist and change takes place in concrete

buds, in which every stage is complete unto itself and without casual explanations.

Both in Einstein's early study of light and in Bohr's study of the hydrogen atom, the

controversy between classical description (with its emphasis on continuity, casual

chains, subject-object separation) and quantum description (with its emphasis on

discontinuity, indeterminacy, probabilistic description, and subject-object coupling) was

fundamental.

Perhaps the most essential aspect of the controversy is elucidated by the

antithetical wave and particle theories of atoms and energy: Are discrete particles--like

electrons in definable quantum orbits--the primary data, or are they guided and steered

by the flow of the underlying waves? It is a figure-ground dilemma. Does one

emphasize the independent activity of individual particles or the hypothetical underlying

waves? Does one determine the behavior of the other? There is either wave-like flow

or sequences of individual changes between stationary states after short periods of rest.

Classical and quantum descriptions also differed in their premises about the

nature of the relationships between the subject (or experimenter) and the object (the

thing observed). In classical theory, they were independent, but the proponents of

quantum theory argued that--in the precise experiments of atomic physics--the

observer, his instruments, and his position in time and space always affect the results

so that no two experiments can be identical. The evidence obtained under different

experimental conditions cannot be comprehended with a single picture, and the only

way the observer can be uninvolved is if he observes nothing at all.

The paradoxes raised by the rival claims of continuity and discontinuity, wave

and particle theories, and classical and quantum descriptions posed a fundamental

27

scientific dilemma. Progress in quantum theory could not be made unless this

antithesis was brought to the forefront of theoretical analysis. Were the conflicts only

illusions--products of the lens of theory and the limits of experimental conditions--or

were they an essential component of scientific reality? And, in either case, how did one

resolve the conflict: by allowing one member of the pair to subsume the other, by

dissolving one member into the other, or by accepting both views as irreducible facts?

As Holton has indicated: Rarely has there been a more obvious fight between different themata vying for allegiance, or a conflict between the aesthetic criteria of scientific choice in the face of the same set of experimental data.60

Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr all formulated

theories to help resolve the paradox. Each answered the question in a very different

way.

Kubler was clearly attracted to Bohr's model, and not those of Broglie,

Heisenberg, and Einstein. His choice was certainly more influenced by spiritual

affinities than by scientific knowledge, but a brief comparison between the solutions is

fruitful in clarifying Kubler's "aesthetic criteria of historical choice."

Broglie believed that Henri Bergson had already found the answer: one could

make discontinuous measurements that described the instantaneous positions of the

entity in motion, but each of those determinations implied a renunciation of the

possibility of grasping its state of motion at the same time. In other words, images of

mobility and localization could not be simultaneously employed, so he favored wave

theory and believed that quantum descriptions was illusory.

Heisenberg's romantic mathematical idealism sought to replace materialistic

physics with the spirituality of Plantonic forms and to prove the unreality of material

60Holton, p. 1030.

28

objects and the indeterminacy of phenomena. It incorporated the participant into the

experiment so that his decisions helped mold physical reality itself.

Einstein, on the other hand, was an absolutist who believed in the invariance and

independence of natural laws from the standpoint of the observer, and he labored to

subsume all reality within a system. Einstein's principle of relativity was in fact a

strategic misnomer of its logical content. It aimed to discover laws of transformation

that correlated differing descriptions of what he believed to be an objective reality. He

was opposed to relativism and subjectivity; he believed in the objectivity of natural law.

His aim was a higher absolutism that demanded even the renunciation of absolute time

and space.

Niels Bohr proposed the principle of "complementarity" in 1927 as his

contribution to the paradox. Holton admirably summarized his position by recounting

Bohr's discussion of light: The study of nature is a study of artifacts that appear during an engagement between the scientist and the world in which he finds himself. And these artifacts themselves are seen through the lens of theory. Thus, different experimental conditions give different views of `nature.' To call light either a wave phenomenon or a particle phenomenon is impossible; in either case, too much is left out. To call light both a wave phenomenon and a particle phenomenon is to oversimplify matters. Our knowledge of light is contained in a number of statements that are seemingly contradictory, made on the basis of a variety of experiments under different conditions, and interpreted in the light of a complex of theories. When you ask, `What is light?' the answer is: the observer, his various pieces and types of equipment, his experiments, his theories and models of interpretation, and whatever it may be that fills an otherwise empty room when the light bulb is allowed to keep on burning. All this, together, is light.61

Holton then described Bohr's principle of complementarity. Bohr's proposal of 1927 was

essentially that: We should attempt not to reconcile the dichotomies, but rather to realize the complementarity of representations of even in these two quite different

61Ibid., p. 1019.

29

languages. The separateness of the accounts is merely a token of the fact that, in the normal language available to us for communicating the results of our experiments, it is possible to express the wholeness of nature only through a complementary mode of descriptions. The apparently paradoxical, contradictory accounts should not divert our attention from the essential wholeness. Bohr's favorite aphorism was Schiller's `Nurie Fülle führt zur Klarheit.' Unlike the situation in earlier periods, clarity does not reside in simplification and reduction to a single, directly comprehensible model, but in the exhaustive overlay of different descriptions that incorporate apparently contradictory notions.62

Bohr denied that any system could subsume all reality. He believed it essential to

renounce the hope of achieving a system or theory based on one model--whether wave

or particle. There is no objectivity independent of all observers; subject and object

always interact in quantum systems and truth is therefore subjective. Furthermore,

there is no causality, only probalistic change. No man-made theory or formula can ever

be adequate to reality. Mutually exclusive descriptions must be regarded as equally

relevant or true, even though they can't be exhibited at the same time. Evidence

obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a

single picture; it must be regarded as "complementary."

The third part of "Style and the Representation of Historical Time" dealt with the

"problem of style," an issue first given scope by Meyer Schapiro's classic survey and

critique of style theory requested by Kroeber for Anthropology Today (1953). Shortly

after its appearance, Kubler questioned Schapiro's normative definition of style in

comments on a paper by T. Proskouriakoff made in 1955: The archaeologist, like many historians of art, usually defines style as a typical grouping of traits, tending towards a limit (or pattern) which binds and confines the individual participants. But another conception emerges from even more detailed histories of certain recent styles. In these cases . . . style becomes an imitable mode of behavior which can be traced back to an individual act of innovation, that by an abrupt `leap forward' resembles an invention, unprecedented, novel, and exemplary. By

62Ibid., pp. 1017-18.

30

this conception, style is a mode of inventive freedom . . . Miss Proskouriakoff's method charts in effect the first recorded appearances of such acts of invention, and she then charts the imitative spread of the behavior.63

This method of using style to chart the temporal development and areal extent of

cultural configurations was derived largely from the work of Alfred Kroeber. It guided

Ancient America and Kubler's other surveys of the late 1950s.

The Shape of Time sidestepped the problem of style by suggesting an alternative

way of "aligning the main events" as "linked successions of prime works with

replications." Kubler's cautions about style were extremely clear: Style describes a specific figure in space better than a type of existence in time.64 The notion of style has no more mesh than wrapping paper or storage boxes.65 . . . We cannot fix anywhere upon an invariant quality such as the idea of style supposes . . . But when duration and setting are retained in view, we have shifting relations, passing moments, and changing places in historic life. Any imaginary dimensions or continuities like style fade from view as soon as we look for them . . . Style is like a rainbow.66 Style pertains to the consideration of static groups of entities. It vanishes once these entities are restored to the flow of time.67

But they had little impact in restraining others from using the concept irresponsibly,

probably because, as Kubler noted in "Style and Representation of Historical Time": I assume that it is probably impossible to portray the content of any duration

63Kubler, "Review of Proskouriakoff's Studies on Middle American Art," in Middle American Anthropology, Special Symposium of the American Archaeological Association, November 1955, pp. 38-39, Pan American Union, Social Science Monographs, V (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1958). 64Kubler, The Shape of Time, p. 4. 65Ibid., p. 32. 66Ibid., p. 129. 67Ibid., p. 130.

31

without invoking the idea of style, if only as a classificatory convenience.68

The dilemma was Bergsonian: duration is diachronic flow; style is a static spatial

concept. Duration is synthetic, dynamic, concrete, and natural; style is analytical, static,

abstract, and formal. The question was whether the two could or should be reconciled.

Kubler's solution unfolded in two stages. The first suggested they could not; the

second that they could. In "Style and Representation of Historical Time" Kubler firmly

rejected Schapiro's synchronic concept of "style as constant form" in favor of

Ackerman's relational concept ("style as a means of establishing relationships among

individual works of art") and Kroeber's diachronic and particulate concept: A style is a strand in a culture or civilization: a coherent self consistent way of expressing certain behavior or performing certain kinds of acts, it is also a selective way: there must be alternate choices.69

Kubler then continued along the same lines he used to discuss duration: If we proceed on the assumptions that style is both relational and developmental, we need to test the connection between relatedness and change. Several propositions, seven at least, can easily be advanced, together with their counterpropositions.70

The seven riddle-like propositions and counter-propositions--reduced, revised, and

elevated to postulates in "Towards a Reductive Theory of Visual Style"--were

complementary, "either-or" statements that revealed the basic dilemma. The idea of style is best adapted to static situations, in crosscut or synchronous section. It is an idea unsuited to duration, which is dynamic, because of the changing nature of every class in duration.71

Only in 1979 did Kubler design a working model that he felt might resolve the

conflict. "Either-or" solutions were replaced by a special case of "both-and" solutions. A

68Kubler, "Style and Representation of Historical Time," p. 389. 69Kroeber, Style and Civilizations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), p. 150. 70Kubler, "Style and Representation," p. 389. 71Ibid., p. 390.

32

new awareness of quantum physics and Niels Bohr's "theory of complementarity"

prepared the way for the solution. Kubler began with space-time distinctions: positing a

Greek "spatial" etymology for the word "style" that paralleled the more commonly

accepted Latin "temporal" etymology. Such an etymology supported Kubler's

contention in The Shape that "style describes a specific figure in space better than a

type of existence in time." Kubler then borrowed linguist Stephen Ullman's concept of

"synonymy" from Style in the French Novel (1957): The pivot of the whole theory of expressiveness is the concept of choice. There can be . . . no question of style unless [there is] . . . the possibility of choosing between alternative forms of expression. Synonymy in the widest sense of the term, lies at the root of the whole problem of style.

The concept admitted that the intention of the maker was central to the aesthetic act

and located the moment as one involving the choice of words. For Kubler: Ullman's stylistic analysis reveals the atomic structure of style as consisting of infinitesimal decisions in an immediate present at `that subsoil of stylistic creation where images are generated and where a new vision of the world is involved.'

Kubler next defined the crucial realms of choice for the visual artist. His componential

analysis combined two concepts to construct a model. Kant's concept of "manifolds"

("the sum of particulars furnished by sense before their unification in understanding")

furnished three fundamental realms: shape, meaning, and time. Bohr's concept of

"complementarity" ("the integrity of human cultures presents features the account of

which implies a typically complementary mode of description") and the concepts of

"infrastructure" and "superstructure" provided complementary and directional modes

within each realm of the manifold: shape (craft to format), meaning (signage to modus),

and time (period to sequence). Kubler's idea of creating a "spatial" and "visible" model

of style was inspired by several things: "componential analyses" in semiotics,

"categorical frameworks" in philosophy, and probably also Murillo's iconographical

program for the claustro chico of San Francisco in Seville, which used alternation and

33

confrontational opposition to build complementary wholes that Kubler had recently

succeeded in decoding. But the model was still incomplete--it lacked the essential

dimension of duration and diachronic flow--so through the hexagon, which represented

the instantaneous but static nexus of choice, "the synchronous choices among

synonymous possibilities," Kubler projected the diachronic flow of time. Bergson's

vision of interpenetrating durational flow and the particulate atomic view of quantum

mechanics were joined as complementary modes of vision: if one attempted to localize

a moving object by measuring an observation made at a specific point in space, one

obtained only a position and the state of motion escaped, and vice versa. The problems

of figuration were not radically different whether one was an atomic physicist or an art

historian.

The Shape of Time possesses many of the qualities of those elusive "prime

objects" that Kubler described in its text. It continues to draw him back to slowly explore

the many possibilities that are latent within its text. These explorations now extend

themselves throughout his work like the composite fibrous bundles that represent his

primary metaphor for the nature of artistic enterprise. We can imagine the flow of time as assuming the shapes of fibrous bundles . . . , with each fiber corresponding to a need upon a particular theater of action, and the length of the fibers varying as to the duration of each need and the solution to its problems. The culture bundles therefore consist of variegated fibrous lengths of happening, mostly long, and many brief. They are juxtaposed largely by chance, and rarely by conscious forethought or rigorous planning.

The text lives for its author through his reflections on its ideas, but also upon those of its

readers. As he notes in the paper on the reception of The Shape of Time that closes

this edition, "But one group is eager to say that they don't understand a word of it. . . .

Those of the other group declare that they understood it all on first reading without

difficulty. . . . Perhaps it is the distinctive and contrasting features in their

comprehension of works of art. But what I say speaks to some, and not to others.

34

Some are ready, and others are not. But when both someday find that they agree in

understanding it, that day may be its end as a book which was alive in the dissension

over its intelligibility."

35

36