Svetlana Alpers: Art Insights
If the world were fair, Svetlana Leontief Alpers would have won a Nobel Prize by now, just like her dad. After all, Wassily Leontief merely pioneered in "the development of the input-output method and its application to important economic problems," as the Nobel Web site explains -- not research that speaks to most of us. His daughter, now 69 -- two years older than her father was when he got his Nobel in 1973 -- has managed to thoroughly rejig how people think about great works of art. And those are objects that can matter to us all.
Of course, part of the unfairness of the world is that there's no Nobel for people who study art, no matter what insights they've had.
Over the past few decades, Alpers has published a series of books that have revolutionized talk about Vermeer and Rembrandt and other Dutch masters. The standard way of getting at these artists had been to pick apart what their pictures mean -- their hidden symbolism, their political messages, their abstruse theology. Alpers took a different tack. She argued that Dutch culture of the time had a novel outlook on the world that favored sight and optics and all kinds of scientific observation, and that this outlook is echoed in the way its paintings look -- the way someone might argue that watching television has changed both how we view the world and what we like in art.
For Alpers, you don't look through a picture to find meaning lurking underneath. You take in what it looks like and try to see how that jibes with what's happening in the world around the artist.
A brand-new Alpers book called "The Vexations of Art" takes that approach and applies it even more widely. It covers figures as diverse as Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez and Manet. It's already getting raves, including from lay people such as British author A.S. Byatt, who recently reviewed it for the Guardian in London.
As Byatt puts it, Alpers "uses history to make things strange."...
Read entire article at Wa Po
Of course, part of the unfairness of the world is that there's no Nobel for people who study art, no matter what insights they've had.
Over the past few decades, Alpers has published a series of books that have revolutionized talk about Vermeer and Rembrandt and other Dutch masters. The standard way of getting at these artists had been to pick apart what their pictures mean -- their hidden symbolism, their political messages, their abstruse theology. Alpers took a different tack. She argued that Dutch culture of the time had a novel outlook on the world that favored sight and optics and all kinds of scientific observation, and that this outlook is echoed in the way its paintings look -- the way someone might argue that watching television has changed both how we view the world and what we like in art.
For Alpers, you don't look through a picture to find meaning lurking underneath. You take in what it looks like and try to see how that jibes with what's happening in the world around the artist.
A brand-new Alpers book called "The Vexations of Art" takes that approach and applies it even more widely. It covers figures as diverse as Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez and Manet. It's already getting raves, including from lay people such as British author A.S. Byatt, who recently reviewed it for the Guardian in London.
As Byatt puts it, Alpers "uses history to make things strange."...