Svetlana Leontief Alpers (née Leontief; 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.

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, 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. Alpers was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. In Spring 2014, she was made an officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the République 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 surname to Alpers.

Honors

Selected publications

Sources