Understanding the Life and Analysis of Svetlana Alpers, an American Art Historian

“I start from looking not from words,” says Svetlana Alpers, an American Art Historian, professor, writer, and critic.  Her quote in a lecture online catches the attention of many as it offers a unique perspective with more meaning than you might think in the field of art history. Additionally, her first major book, The Art of Describing has an appealing name that sounds fascinating to explore for those entering the art history field.  This paper will examine the life, achievements, and contribution to art history by Svetlana Alpers and attempt to uncover an understanding of her drive, understanding, and passion for the art world.

           Svetlana Alpers is an important person in the field of art history in the late twentieth century. Alpers was not necessarily a highly productive writer, but her books have prompted a large amount of interest and discussion because of her inclination for braving complex and intricate issues. What is unique is the fact that most of her writing has focused on the visual culture of the Baroque period and each of her books has had a very different and unusual punch and persona.

           Originally born February 10, 1936, Svetlana Leontief, the young art historian graduated from Radcliffe College with a Bachelors of Art in 1957. Within one year she married taking on her husband's surname of Alpers. Her innovative approach to art history got started when in 1960 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, she published an article covering Vasari's verbal descriptions of art (ekphrasis) as she proceeded to complete her graduate work in art history at Harvard. In 1962, while working on her dissertation, she accepted a teaching post as an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated from Harvard in 1965.

           Her thesis was on the Peter Paul Rubens major series Torre de la Parada. Her effort in Rubens' archives brought her to the attention of Roger d'Hulst, a professor of art history at the University of Ghent, who convinced her to turn her dissertation into a "catalogue raissoné" on Rubens. Thus, she published The Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, number nine. Today, the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard catalog project numbers 27 parts, spanning 44 titles. Many parts of the catalog are available for download online.

           One of Alpers important first of many articles appeared in Daedalus, a peer-reviewed, journal of the American Academy of Arts in 1977, examining progressive scholarship in art history in contrast with an earlier scholarship. Alpers appeared to go dark in the publishing, but then in February 1983, she co-founded the progressive interdisciplinary journal, Representations, where she published "Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas," in the first issue. 

           Also in 1983, she would publish her first groundbreaking work in art history, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. The book's fundamental thesis focused on the immediacy and simplicity of Dutch painting and the Dutch history of describing the interiors and domestic scenes, often contrasting it with an Italian narrative painting. She professed that Iconographical approaches to Baroque artworks such as those practiced by Erwin Panofsky and others were inadequate to understand Dutch imagery truly. Her book furthermore criticized the Dutch scholarship of the day and its reliance on emblems from emblemata books to explain Netherlandish still life painting. The Art of Describing, while it was well received like many new theories had its share of critics. The critics accused her of selective use of evidence, drawing only from paintings and texts which only supported her theories.

           In The Art of Describing, Alpers characterizes ‘iconicity’ as a ‘pervasive and limiting assumption of the study of art history,’ she disputes historians were searching meanings hidden which led to overlooking ‘the pictorial mode.' Instead, she claims that the ‘visual culture’ of the Netherlands is presented through the growth of scientific knowledge and the development of new experimental technology, Alpers explores the idea that the ‘descriptive’ character of Dutch painting is closely tied to the ‘advancement of learning’ and artists invested in visual distillation as opposed to textual forms of knowledge. Paintings would serve as an ‘intermediary’ through which life could be expressed. This pictorial depiction is classified as one of the ways of ‘representing’ the visual world. For example, in some of Vermeer’s most well-known paintings, such as Young Woman with a Water Jug and The Art of Painting, a map is shown as a wall-hanging, which shows a creating a relationship between the painted surface and the knowledge acquisition of the time. 

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Jug, c.1662, oil on canvas, 46 × 41 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting (The Artist’s Studio), c.1665–66, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

           In 1988, Alpers published a monograph on the artist, Rembrandt. The book, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, was not the traditional art-historical monograph on the development of style or use of subject matter by an artist, rather it examined Rembrandt's marketing strategies and the economic modeling of his art to appeal to a Dutch consumer base.   Alpers writing would again shake up the traditional themes in publishing art history thus making some of the book reviewers uncomfortable. This review from Burlington Magazine reads, "Useful as a counterbalance to earlier romantic appraisals of Rembrandt though this book may be, its narrow focus on his mercantile values ultimately impoverishes the art. This is not simply because portions read like an economics textbook, but because Alpers never fully intimates Rembrandt's aesthetic ingenuity or spiritual expression. Obviously, these are challenges for which the disciplines and vocabulary of economics and social history are ill-equipped."

           In 1994, Alpers along with Michael Baxandall, a fellow Berkeley faculty member and art historian published a book that was a very different kind of endeavor. Titled, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, they provided a close analysis of the principal aspects of eighteenth-century European artist Tiepolo's paintings, citing his unconventional use of pictorial space and portrayal of subject matter to show how it related to his inventive process. The book was very positively reviewed by critics who were relieved that Alpers and Baxandall had avoided any controversial issues and addressed a traditional art history assessment to celebrate Tiepolo's affluent frescoes. One critic is quoted of asking, rhetorically, "Is it possible, then, to combine postmodern political awareness with visual sensitivity?"

           In this retrospective timeline, it should be noted that Alpers took early retirement from Berkeley in 1994. She accepted a generous golden handshake the university was offering to senior faculty. Retirement was only from teaching; her publishing would continue.

           In 1996, Alpers published, The Making of Rubens, but claims she has been working on it intermittently since the late 1980s. She explores Rubens's political acumen as revealed in his oil painting of a peasant festival, The Kermis. The book discusses the reception of Rubens's work in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, and she proposes that the fat, drunken character of the bacchant Silenus that appears in numerous paintings and drawings is Rubens's symbol for overwhelming creative abandonment.

           It would not be until October 2001 that her new book, Alex Katz: Large Paintings, would be published. Painter Alex Katz is a unique character in the players of postwar American art.  An article about Alpers and her praise of Katz quotes Alpers as saying “art as something distinctive, something which might have its own history” and art is “one cultural artifact among many others made at a particular time.”

           In 2007, Alpers collaborated with artists James Hyde and Barney Kulok on a unique project entitled Painting Then for Now. The project consists of 19 photographic prints based on the suite of three paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo that hang at the top of the main staircase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. The project was exhibited at David Krut Gallery, NY. Six of the prints were later acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY. The book and exhibit, like Alpers other books, raises profound, challenging questions about Tiepolo's master paintings, contemporary art, and their relationship. For the book, small sections of Tiepolo's works were photographed in a six-hour session. A show was created, and images were viewed without knowing their sources; the photographs would show small abstract features, body parts or parts of objects. Tiepolo could hardly have imagined that these parts would be photographed, but what do they tell us about his art? How do we impose our modern ways of seeing upon his paintings? Alternatively, rather, once know where the photographs came from, do they send us back to see Tiepolo's paintings as he intended on how they should be viewed? Alpers and her cohorts again, take a unique approach to discover and interpreting art history.

           December 2007 brought a new book, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others. The Vexations of Art takes its title from Francis Bacon, from his definition of natural history - "nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state and squeezed and moulded." Alpers moves us backward and forwards in time as she analyses the effect of the work. She highlights the phrase "what is to be done," which is suitably mysterious but not unusual for the author. How does an artist know "what is to be done"? She implies that there is always something new that can come out of works that were in competition with, or provoked or suggested by, older works. This could explain why we make works of art at all.

           In Aug 20, 2013 Alpers published Roof Life which is a collection of essays of discrete, expressive thoughts on the undervalued art of looking (“That sense of life seen at a distance, and my pleasure in it”) that don’t necessarily fall into the categories of art history, criticism, or memoir. She describes how the 'act of distancing creates art. For example, how confronting the unsavory art market in her effort to sell a small Rothko painting, she discovers “the sense of letting go was when it struck me as a work of art.”

           In the last few years, Alpers contributes to books by other art historian authors. In April 2016 she contributes to, Catherine Murphy, which was authored by John Yau. The book is about the American artist Catherine Murphy who is a renowned representational painter of exceptional precision, and this monograph, Catherine Murphy, surveys her complete work, which strives to unite American Minimalism and American naturalist painting. In October 2017, Alpers contributes to, Walker Evans, which was authored with Clement Cheroux. The book is about Walker Evans, who was one of the most important American photographers of the 20th century.

           In looking at the organizations in which Alpers was involved, we discover that in 1971, she was selected to the Board of Directors of the College Art Associate, remaining there until 1976. In 1979-80, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Also, mentioned previously, she was the co-chair of the influential and widely-cited publication Representations through issue number 43 wherein Summer 1993 she stepped down. Today, she retains her title as Professor Emerita. She also serves as a consultant to both National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

           In conclusion, we have uncovered an extensive map of her endeavors, understanding, and passion for the art world. Svetlana Alpers through her career and life has managed to thoroughly improve how people think about great works of art and how art objects can matter to us all. Over her career, she has published many books that have transformed talk about Vermeer, Rembrandt, and other Dutch masters. The typical way of analyzing and understanding these artists would be to uncover what their pictures mean -- discover their hidden symbolism, find their political messages, locate their obscure theology. However, Alpers took a different path. She contended that Dutch culture of the time had a unique outlook on the world that favored display, optics and all kinds of scientific observation and that this viewpoint echoes the way their paintings look -- today, we might say how someone that is watching television has changed in how they view the world and what they like in art.

Bibliography

1.    Alpers, Svetlana. "Interpretation without Representation, Or, the Viewing of Las Meninas." Representations, no. 1 (1983): 31-42. doi:10.2307/3043758.

2.    Montias, J. M. The Journal of Economic History 48, no. 4 (1988): 949-51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121650.

3.    Website: https://www.rubenianum.be/en/page/corpus-rubenianum-ludwig-burchard-online

4.    Sutton, Peter C., Burlington Magazine, v.131 (June 1989), p.430.

Svetlana Alpers Required Book Reading List:

1.    The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

2.    Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

3.    The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others

4.    The Making of Rubens

5.    Roof Life

6.    Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence

7.    The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part IX) (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard)

8.    The Concept of Style

9.    Alex Katz: Large Paintings: October 17-November 10, 2001

10. Painting Then For Now. Fragments of Tiepolo at the Ca' Dolfin