The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others

by Svetlana Alpers

Velázquez is often considered an artist great, but isolated in a palace/ museum in Spain. This highly original book sets him in conjunction with certain conditions of painting in his time and after.From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, roughly from Rembrandt and Vermeer to Matisse and Picasso, a succession of European painters has taken the studio as the world; that is, the studio is where the world—as it gets into painting—is experienced. Svetlana Alpers first focuses on this retreat into the confines of the studio, then looks at the ways in which the paintings of the Dutch masters  and Velázquez acknowledge war and rivalry while offering a way out. The final chapters give a new account of Velázquez’s The Spinners , a ravishing painting which has been eclipsed by interest in the enigmas of Las Meninas. Alpers concentrates on the seventeenth century but also looks back to Velázquez’s predecessors Titian and Rubens and forward to his modern successors. She discusses Velázquez’s resemblance to Manet, whose art also vexes or unsettles, giving us reason to pause and look. The book concludes by asking whether painting continues to do that today.

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction, Biography

308 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Scholar of Dutch baroque art; professor of History of Art, UC Berkeley,1962-1994; exponent of the "new art history."

Born Sventlana Leontief, she graduated from Radcliffe College with a B.A. in 1957. She married the following year, assuming her husband's surname of Alpers. She continued graduate work in art history at Harvard University publishin an article on Vasari's verbal descriptions of art (ekphraseis) in 1960 in the Journal of the Warburg and Coutauld Institutes, which announced her innovative approach to art history. Alpers accepted a teaching position as an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 while working on her dissertation. She graduated from Harvard in 1965, writing her thesis under Seymour Slive on the Peter Paul Rubens cycle Torre de la Parada. Her work in Rubens' archives brought her to the attention of Roger d'Hulst, who suggested she turn her dissertation into a volume for the catalogue raissoné on Rubens. She rose to the rank of Professor at Berkeley. In 1971 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of the College Art Associate (remained until 1976). That same year here volume for the Rubens catalogue raissoné, The Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, number nine, was published.

In 1977 an important methodological article by Alpers appeared in Daedalus examining progressive scholarship in art history in contrast with earlier scholarship. During the academic year 1979-80 she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1983, Alpers co-founded the progressive interdisciplinary journal Representations, publishing the article, "Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas," in the first issue. That year, too, she published the first of her ground-breaking works in art history, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. The book's central thesis focused on the the immediacy and simplicity of Dutch painting and the Dutch preoccupation with the description of interiors and domestic scenes, contrasting it with narrative Italian painting. Iconographical approaches to baroque art, she wrote, such as those practiced by Erwin Panofsky and others, were insufficient to understand Dutch imagery. Her book likewise criticized mainstream Dutch scholarship and its reliance on emblems and emblemata books explain Netherlandish still life paining. The Art of Describing was well received, reviewers hailing Alper's mastery of topics as diverse as optics and perspective theory. Critics, however, accused her of selective use of evidence, drawing only from paintings and texts which supported her theories.

In 1988, during the era of shocking reattributions of many works of Rembrandt by the Rembrandt Research Project, Alpers published a monograph on the artist, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market The book examined Rembrandt's market strategies and his modeling his art to appeal to a Dutch consumer base. Her use of economic theory and a concerted avoidance of visual criteria again upset traditionalists in the art world.

Alpers co-wrote a book with fellow Berkeley art historian Michael Baxandall in 1994, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. She was named Professor Emerita from Berkeley in 1994. The following year she returned to the art of the low countries with her Making of Rubens. The book looked at Rubens' politics, his later critical reception in France, and theorized specific meaning in the recurring Silenus figures of his later work.

Reaction to Alpers was summed up by Walter Liedtke. In an article on American historians of Dutch art, he characterized her work as containing "whole exclusions" of art that did not fit her thesis--such as the Utrecht school--a "typical exercise in American taste dressed up (with some French motifs) as a new analysis of Dutch Art." However, her work Rembrandt's Enterprise was included among the 169 major writings of art history in the 2010 Hauptwerke der Kunstgeschicht

Reviews

[Alessio]

What a brilliant book. Chockfull of delightful insights into the relationship between the artist and the studio, the Dutch 'painterly pacific' and of course, a riveting appreciation of Velázquez and his singularity in resisting painting derivatives of Titian and Rubens whilst expressing restraint. The notes section is also a cornucopia of further reading. Very lucidly written.

[Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you can find the discussion between svetlana alpers and m. collings in MODERN PAINTERS this book takes a whole new meaning.

[Doria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a fine book, artfully written - and I mean that sincerely, no irony intended. Alpers’ writing, which is invitingly beautiful and delivered in sentences admirable for their brevity, somehow still manages to wrap one in loops of ecstatic conundrums that are a bit difficult for a lay reader to parse. I found that I had to read it in short portions, not hard to do as each chapter is nicely broken up into smaller sections. The author’s enthusiasm glows with an incandescent if bookish fire from off of the page. That went a long way towards sustaining my interest, especially in the passages where I got almost dizzy trying to comprehend some of her finer points. I don’t mind being caught up in someone else’s scholarly passion, though; it’s preferable to the torpor too often found in such tomes.

Alpers’ analysis of Velazquez’s Mercury and Argus with an eye to his incipient pacifist inclinations is brilliant, and her extended discussion and comparison of Manet and Velazquez is intriguing. (She cleverly enlists the aid of Monsieur Baudelaire to that end, never hurts to bolster one’s argument with a keen-witted eye witness.) Her ongoing discourse on The Spinners is of monumental importance, and delivered tactically in measured segments throughout the book, helping the overall digestive process for (non-artist) readers. For a painter, I would think this must be nothing short of heaven. For the rest of us, it offers a near-delirious glimpse into someone else’s paradise. It’s better than it sounds.