[1] After completing his studies, Kaufmann was unable to obtain an academic position and so earned a living as a bank clerk.
In 1933, Kaufmann published the book Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, which argued for a formal aesthetic continuity between neoclassicism and modernism.
[2] After the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by the Nazis, Kaufmann, a Jew, managed to emigrate to the US, where he taught art history at various universities.
His style of writing and scholarship is termed formalism, derived to an extent from the philosopher Immanuel Kant's notion of autonomy in art, from his work Critique of Judgement, where, in Kant's own words, art is "a mode of representation which is purposive for itself and which although devoid of a purpose, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interests of communication.
"[3] Kaufmann was influential on later formalistic architectural historians and critics such the British-American academic Colin Rowe in the 1950s and the Italian architect and theorist Aldo Rossi in the 1960s.