One bright chilly morning a year ago, I attended a tour of Picasso canvases and drawings at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, the brainchild of an author and friend and one which featured breathtaking pieces from French and American museums as well as private collections. Some had never been shown publicly. There were perhaps 50 in our group; she shepherded us from room to room, laying out her larger theme regarding the virtuoso. In the last gallery hung a painting reputed to be Picasso’s final completed work: a naked man and woman straddling each other, knots of flesh and limbs, traits difficult to parse, a throwback to Cubism. Afterwards, we gathered for a celebratory luncheon at a glamorous restaurant, where downtown artists mingled with publishing luminaries and Patti Smith, sipping champagne from crystal flutes. I was seated next to a former head curator at one of the city’s marquee museums. We chatted about the exhibit and that perplexing canvas, which he confessed he couldn’t “read” at all.
Read — his verb.
I understood what he meant. We’d tried to scan the image like a poem, sifting for compositional clues, pictorial language, flickers of story. Even at the end of his life, Picasso’s genius for confounding expectations was strong. The act of reading art has been at the center of Svetlana Alpers’s lengthy and eminent career, captured in Is Art History?, a compendium of essays and lectures that spans six decades. A renowned art historian at the University of California at Berkeley, a specialist in the Northern European Renaissance Masters, Alpers retired in 2000 and moved to New York; and as her most recent criticism attests, she’s still got the goods. Is Art History? offers a model for literary critics and scholars, unpacking the complex issue of “close readings” and why they matter as our civilization flirts with authoritarianism and a new Dark Ages.
Is Art History? centers on what Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review of Books, calls “descriptive criticism,” which “arrives at its insights by sticking close to the work at hand while also seeking (struggling) to find words of its own to describe the work and the feelings and thoughts it evokes and contends with.” Alpers is Frank’s kind of critic: she’s at home with theory but prefers to stand in awe before Vermeer and Velázquez, absorbing, one-on-one, larger questions of chronology and technique. (Her pieces on both painters are marvels unto themselves.) Alpers’ methodology owes a debt to the New Criticism; she frequently cites how art history has taken cues from literary fields.
As a fledgling academic in 1960, she looks back four centuries to Vasari and his foundational Lives of the Artists. Her early articles are a tad stilted in their language, a young scholar’s bid to join the dons who have taught her; and yet even here Alpers distills a core principle that will steer her course: “Looking at art and describing what he saw legitimately involved for Vasari what we today might think of as ‘reading in.’ He was offering a guide and commentary whose force was supposed to result precisely from selectivity.” She asserts the primacy of the visual encounter — the intimacy between painter and viewer — by affirming the primal art historian and his method of approaching Giotto and Raphael.
The notion of a frame as a window into another realm isn’t original, but Alpers puts her stamp on it. The frame is what defines painting as painting, distinct from other forms, like sculpture. “It is Alberti who instructed the artist to lay down a rectangle on the model of the window frame,” she writes of the influential theorist. “The picture is the artist’s construct, an expression in paint, as Alberti says, of the intersection of the visual plane at a given distance from the observer. It could be argued that Alberti’s greatest invention was this picture itself. The framed rectangle on the wall which became the basis of the art of painting in the West is distinct from the painted walls of Egypt, the scrolls of China, the pages of India or even the panels of Byzantium.”
She finds her footing among the Dutch Masters, easing into her voice, more confident, less dogmatic. Alpers is at her best in those pieces transcribed from her lectures — close readings, if you will — of singular creators and canvases. In “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants” she investigates “The Wedding Dance,” connecting its figures to comic peasant figures in Shakespeare and Erasmus, indicating a mixture of classes and raising questions about community and morality. (Bruegel’s picture presages Matisse’s colorful tour de force housed in the Museum of Modern Art.)
Her response to the rise of a feminist art history, “Art History and Its Exclusion,” lauds the necessary search for erased female talent but shrugs off an ideology of gendered art. Not for her the fashionable trends of criticism. Instead, she unearths more commonalities between men and the (very few) women in the South and North than, say, among women active in Florence and Antwerp. She’s focused on what’s in front of her. Consider her interpretation of Vermeer’s mysterious “Music Lesson”: “Vermeer demonstrates four ways of representing, but also four different versions of the relationship between a man and a woman. Significantly, each one is presented as partial, not just in respect to the others, but also in respect to the viewer. Each is cut off from total view: the woman’s face is turns away from us, the mirror shows only her face, the picture on the wall is sliced by the frame, the inscription interrupted by the woman’s body. This is how the world is known: incompletely, and in pieces.” That last sentence should be inscribed on the minds of readers in all genres.
Alpers has a bee in her bonnet, though: the Italian Renaissance, which has served as a template for the discipline, a kind of glorious past that the present invokes again and again. That she prefers the Dutch Renaissance lends a sense of urgency to Is Art History?: the perspectival breakthroughs articulated by Alberti versus the pearly light and surfaces in the North. The profession leans too Italo-centric, in her view. “This aesthetic view might not be far from what we find in literary studies … the entire sense of what it means to be addressed or studied as a work of art is tied up with the art object as it was defined (in certain quarters) in the Renaissance.” Could the same be said of Shakespeare as a keystone of our English canon?
[Right: Vermeer, The Glass of Wine, 1659-61]. She draws incisive parallels between the realism of Vermeer and that practiced in 19th-century France, with Courbet as the exemplar, shaping the techniques of novelists such as Flaubert and Zola. Her yen to recognize all manner of dialogues, across mediums and centuries, enriches Is Art History? (There’s a surprising and illuminating essay on Brazil.) Her recent pieces, composed after her retirement, reach beyond her métier, as she probes thorny issues of narrative and representation and the ever-vexing term “style.” She’s churned out reviews of exhibits and books, venturing into our era as she weighs Modernism and abstraction. Brevity is the soul of wit, as the Bard opined, and Alpers delivers.
In his Introduction to Is Art History?, the Stanford art historian Richard Meyer, himself mentored by Alpers, emphasizes a central tenet in her writings: they “make for good conversation. Alpers speaks directly to the reader — makes claims, offers judgments, voices disagreement with other writers. Her views are not implicit or assumed. When the first-person pronoun surfaces, it is not for the purpose of confessing personal experience or subjective emotion. It is rather an ‘I’ that asserts ideas, emphasizes distinctions, reveals a point of view.” His is a welcome reminder: good conversation — about Picasso and Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Morrison, capitalism and socialism — anchors us amid the flotsam of cultural buzzwords and X discourse. It doesn’t claim supremacy over the noise of contemporary life — it doesn’t have to.
Consciously or not, Is Art History? advocates for generalism, recalling David Epstein’s Range. The heart of its mission is contemplation of the aesthetic object. It also echoes the Swiss critic Wolfgang Iser and his concept of “reader reception” — that is, the reader is a creative collaborator, filling absences bubbled within a painting or text. Alpers notes: “As scholars, art historians all too often see themselves as being in pursuit of knowledge without recognizing how they themselves are the makers of knowledge.”
Our literary culture desperately needs “makers of knowledge” — I call them generalists — with fiction critics trained to dip into science, history, biography, and poetry; an immersion in nonfiction boosts our skills, our ability to discern context when we turn to novels, short stories, and works in translation. As Alpers might say: pick well, read well, write well. Her trajectory should inspire us to advance a criticism — clear-eyed, loose-limbed — liberated from the turgid jargon of the academy.
[Published by Hunters Point Press on September 24, 2024, 420 pages, $40.00 hardcover]
To read Ron Slate’s On The Seawall review of Svetlana Alpers’ Roof Life, click here.