Svetlana Alpers

Svetlana Leontief Alpers (born 1936) is an American artist, art historian and critic. She is a university professor and a consultant to both National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father was Wassily Leontief, a Nobel laureate in economics. She has 2 children, Benjamin Alpers (born in 1965) and Nicholas Alpers (born in 1968) and 4 grandchildren.

Alpers received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1957 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1965. She was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley from 1962 to 1998, where she is now Professor Emerita. She is a visiting critic at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Her specialty was 17th Century Dutch art, although she has also worked on Tiepolo, Rubens, Breugel, and Velazquez, among others.

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, 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.

Memberships and Distinctons

• Phi Beta Kappa
• Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, 1957-8
• Kathryn-McHale Fellowship, AAUW, 1961-2
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1972-3
• Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, 1975-6
• ACLS Fellowship, 1978–79
• Visiting Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), Wassenaar, 1979
• Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979–80
• Eugene-M.-Kayen-Prize 1983 for "The Art of Describing"
• Distinguished Teaching Award, Berkeley, 1986
• Visiting Scholar, Getty Research Institute, California, 1987–88
• Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1991
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991
• Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, 1992–93
• Honorary Doctor, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2009

Writings (selection)

• The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Brussels/London, 1971.
• The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983
• Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988
• Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994 (with Michael Baxandall)
• The Making of Rubens, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
• The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others, New Haven and London:: Yale University Press, 2005

References

• Bowman, John S. Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 14.

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