Kubler, Spratling, and Quetzalcoatl

Abstract

Discussion| December 18 2020 Kubler, Spratling, and Quetzalcoatl Christopher S. Wood Christopher S. Wood Christopher S. Wood is professor of German at New York University. His books include A History of Art History (Princeton University Press, 2019), Anachronic Renaissance (Zone Books, 2010), and Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Wood is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2020) 2 (4): 61–66. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.61 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christopher S. Wood; Kubler, Spratling, and Quetzalcoatl. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 18 December 2020; 2 (4): 61–66. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.61 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search When George Kubler says that so few “native art motifs” persisted beyond the conquest that it is more correct to speak of an extinction than a survival, he is signalling his own “realist” approach to the question. He implies that those modern writers who speak of survival are presenting the effects of the conquest in an excessively positive light.1 Succumbing to wishful thinking, they too eagerly attribute perseverance, resourcefulness, and adaptive ingenuity to the Mesoamerican peoples. He was thinking no doubt of Anita Brenner—later in the same essay, speaking of “false and imaginary survivals” of Maya forms, he disparages those who everywhere see “idols behind altars” (21/69)—but also of more orthodox academic scholars like Alfred Neumeyer and John McAndrew. Kubler implies that such observers overrate the significance of the formal survivals. There is no way to spin the catastrophe, he suggests; “survival” is a euphemism since by the eighteenth... You do not currently have access to this content.