Name Svetlana Alpers Role Art Historian | Parents Wassily Leontief | |
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Grandparents Eugenia Bekker, Wassily W. Leontief Books The Art of Describing, Rembrandt's enterprise, Tiepolo and the pictorial i, Roof Life, The Vexations of Art Similar People Michael Baxandall, Wassily Leontief, Zoe Leonard, Ernst Gombrich, Rosalind E Krauss | ||
2018/06/28 Curso Museografías. Modos de ver el arte. Intervención de Estrella de Diego
Svetlana Leontief Alpers (born February 10, 1936) is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others, and is one of the most influential American art historians of her generation.
Contents
- 20180628 Curso Museografas Modos de ver el arte Intervencin de Estrella de Diego
- Education and career
- Critical responses
- Personal life
- Honors
- Selected publications
- References
Education and career
Svetlana Alpers received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1957 and a Ph.D.from Harvard in 1965. She was a professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley from 1962 to 1998, and by 1994 she was named Professor Emerita.
In 1983 Alpers co-founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations with American literary critic Stephen Greenblatt.
In 2007 she collaborated with artists James Hyde and Barney Kulok on a 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, New York. 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 in New York City.
In Spring 2014 Alpers was made an officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republique Francaise. On May 28, 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard University.
Critical responses
In a critical review of Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, for conservative magazine The New Criterion, Hilton Kramer described it as an emblematic event "As far as the study of art history is concerned” and more particularly, what has gone wrong with it”. He argues that it attacks Rembrandt for "having commodified himself by virtue of having painted and marketed his own self-portraits". He describes a debt to Fredric Jameson's “Postmodernism and Consumer Society", with "Professor Alpers’s “Rembrandt” coming to resemble an artist like Andy Warhol, the most successful "entrepreneur of the self". He accuses Alpers of removing the greatest art categorically from the realm of aesthetics, using it as "just another counter in the dialectic of material culture. Such, too, is the dismal fate of art history when the study of art is no longer its primary concern."
Personal life
Svetlana Leontief was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the only child of Wassily Leontief, a political refugee from the Soviet Union and Nobel laureate economist who pioneered computer modeling, and the poet Estelle Marks. In 1958 she married and changed her last name to Alpers.