The peasants in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Wedding Dance refuse to behave. Decked out in jaunty colors and upbeat codpieces, they lift their doughy limbs and clod-shaped shoes in exuberant party mode. Painted in 1566, the year of the Calvinist iconoclastic frenzy known as the Beeldenstorm, the picture was long read by art historians as a homily on lower-class dissipation. The problem, Svetlana Alpers observed more than fifty years ago, is that none of Bruegel’s hundred or so revelers actually look very debauched. In the foreground they dance hand to hand, not cheek to cheek, in the middle ground they stand around chatting, and while distant fields allow for a bit of snogging, nobody is vomiting or fighting or lying passed out in the mud. As a means of deterrence, it seems about as effective as showing a TikTok of jolly pot-smoking college students to a DARE class.
Alpers’s account of this puzzle is one of the early pleasures of Is Art History?, a new collection of her writings. Perplexed by the disconnect between the painting’s appearance and its putative purpose, she went back to sixteenth-century Netherlandish sources. There she found that while dancing was generally frowned on, an exception was carved out for weddings. She also learned that among the newly minted urban classes (the people who bought paintings), peasants were a subject of fascination both condescending and admiring. From this and other evidence she concluded that pictures like The Wedding Dance were made for buyers seeking “amusement more than the pictorial equivalent of a sermon.” It didn’t look like a homily because it wasn’t one.
She went further: the problem wasn’t just that art historians had grabbed the wrong message, it was that they had presupposed there to be a coherent message. Unlike sermons, successful paintings, she maintained, can embrace contradiction and ambiguity. They can be alert descriptions of folk customs while at the same time providing wink-wink, nudge-nudge comedy. It is a kind of doubling, she wrote, “that perhaps art alone can do.”
Now eighty-eight, Alpers is one of the grandes dames of art history, a role that did not exist when she started out. (At the University of California, Berkeley, she was for a time one of just three female full professors on a faculty of some 1,500.) She is best known for her work on Dutch painting, but the contents of the new volume roam from a 1959 graduate school paper on Giorgio Vasari to a 2023 review on the freshly topical subject of Juan de Pareja, painter and enslaved assistant to Diego Velázquez. In between she weighs in on mid-century abstraction, photography, dead scholars, and living artists. A gamboling peasant may seem a world away from David Hammons selling snowballs on Astor Place in New York, but like almost everything in this volume, both provide the occasion for important questions about artistic intent and execution, the experience of looking, and the dodgy relationship between words and pictures.
The book that made Alpers famous (at least art-historian famous) was The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, published in 1983. Serious enough to upend accepted wisdom in the field and accessible enough to enjoy broad readership among the art-attuned public, it made the case that the beloved art of Vermeer, Rembrandt, et al had been fundamentally misunderstood by art history thanks to the ingrained scholarly preference for textual meanings over visual ones and to a habitual bias in favor of the Italian Renaissance. Unsurprisingly, it ruffled feathers.
The paralyzing wee-hours panic that haunts the art professions is the thought that maybe, after all, art is just stuff, like shoes or placemats. The mantra repeated to ease that dread has for centuries been “meaning”: art is different from stuff because, like great literature, it has something to say about what it means to be human, how we live our lives, what we believe. The catch, of course, is that “meaning” is so vague and malleable a concept, it borders on meaningless.
This is a problem, Alpers points out, that “did not exist in antiquity (when the visual arts were never ranked with poetry).” With the Italian Renaissance, however, art effectively internalized the aspirations of literature. Her 1959 Vasari paper (a challenging opener, given its gobs of untranslated Italian) examined the conventions whereby Renaissance paintings were initially—and as it turned out, lastingly—described and understood as narratives. These were pictures made to our measure: everything was arranged in relation to the human figures within the canvas, as well as to the anticipated position of the human viewer outside the canvas. To make their stories feel more present, artists mastered anatomy and mathematical principles of proportion and perspective. Thus a technical skill was transformed into an intellectual vocation.
Art history as an academic discipline grew out of those pictures and those ideas. Analytical tools were derived for differentiating styles (hard edges versus soft, exaggerated gestures versus modest ones, stepped compositions versus whirligigs) through which things could be sorted into quasi-Linnaean categories (High Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque). Iconography was developed, most memorably by Erwin Panofsky, to unravel plotlines through symbol and allegory. (The “symbology” of Dan Brown’s novels is the ultimate art-denying diminishment of iconography—the reduction of pictorial complexity to a simple cipher.) Paintings were analyzed as a kind of 2D architecture for the orderly passage of the eye. When I was in graduate school, more than a half-century after the invention of Kodachrome, “Painting of the Italian Renaissance” was still taught with black-and-white slides, presumably because it was easier to identify structure without the distraction of color (which is to say, without the distraction of experiencing what the paintings actually looked like). In the seventeenth century, Alpers tells us, praise for an artist’s handling of color was “a kind of booby prize awarded to those who, it was thought, could not narrate.”
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Alpers’s concern, articulated across multiple essays and lectures in Is Art History?, was that this toolkit had been mistaken for an art historical Theory of Everything. “It is no exaggeration,” she wrote in the 1970s, “to say that 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.” Akin, perhaps, to the way medical studies of men have been used to make treatment recommendations for women, the data from one population was presumed valid for all.
When it came to Dutch art, the search for meaning in an Italian mode led scholars to strange places, like the persistent desire (amazingly, still with us) to cast Vermeer’s numinous women as avatars of sin. Among the examples Alpers supplies is Woman Holding a Balance, in which the presence of pearls, a scale for weighing gold, and a shadowy painting of the Last Judgment were read as warning against the eternal consequences of vanity and greed. If you consider each object as an isolated clue, this is not unreasonable: jewelry and scales were used that way in emblem books. In the painting, however, the pearls are left on the table, the pans of the balance are empty, and the woman is thoughtfully checking their calibration. And, as with the Bruegel, Vermeer’s painting would do a lousy job of dissuasion—really, who wouldn’t want to step into that light?
Alpers offers an alternative iconographic interpretation: the scale-holding woman as a symbol of justice. She also wants us to notice not just what Vermeer painted but how—the way the astonishing specificity of depicted things tugs attention away from generic anecdote and toward inimitable particulars. For purposes of narrative this imitative effort was surely surplus to requirements, and in the Vasarian view, imitation without narrative was pointless. The contorted theories of art historians, Alpers argued, arose from attempting “to lend the right kind of significance to an otherwise—by Italian standards—insignificant art.” (Proof of this conjecture might be seen in the otherwise inexplicable success of Han van Meegeren’s famous Vermeer forgery, The Supper at Emmaus, whose nonsensical anatomy and general clumsiness were rendered invisible in the alluring light of a bona fide biblical plotline.)
Alpers proposed a different kind of meaning for Northern painting—one embedded not in dramatized human action but in the observable world itself. The intellectual component wasn’t found in its aspiration to poetry but in its alignment with cartography, astronomy, microscopy, and optics. In her essay “Art History and Its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art” she considers the quintessential Renaissance subject of the female nude, brought into being and arranged for the viewer’s pleasure, as representative of a “commanding attitude taken toward the possession of the world.” By contrast, in Vermeer’s stupendous View of Delft, with its impersonal drone-like vantage point, “it is the world, not the maker or viewer, which has priority.” What had been excluded from art history was more than a style, it was a way of being.
One might (and numerous scholars did) find these assertions overly broad, but Alpers’s central point—that multiple modes of meaning exist even within the Western canon, and that attitudes toward power may permeate art so thoroughly as to pass unrecognized—was one whose time had come. Michel Foucault’s account of the painted ricochet of looking in Velázquez’s Las Meninas had inspired fresh investigations into representation in social and intellectual history. Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” first published in 1971, set in motion a widespread reexamination of hierarchical notions of quality. Barbara Novak was reconsidering another mode of art that was all but meaningless in Italianate terms—nineteenth-century American landscape painting—as a pictured space of intellectual ferment.
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Alpers’s “Art History and Its Exclusions” was first presented in a session of the Women’s Caucus for Art at the 1978 College Art Association meeting and was subsequently published in the 1982 anthology Feminism and Art History. Alpers wasn’t writing about women (the most visible woman artist of the Golden Age, Judith Leyster, doesn’t get so much as a shout-out), but thinking in feminist terms was about more than demographics. It meant being curious, she wrote, about “what art history has been alert to and what it has not.” The question Alpers raised in relation to Italy and the Netherlands—“How can one conduct a study of all art with tools and assumptions developed in the service of one?”—has had very long legs.
To readers in the twenty-first century, the early essays in this book may seem to be fighting old fights. It has been decades since the Renaissance ruled the art historical roost. The discipline today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments. These are changes Alpers helped bring about, yet the 1977 essay from which the current book takes its title was a prescient statement of concern: “With such a profusion of objects and cultures, with old hierarchies crumbling, how does one justify such an occupation as looking?”
Is Art History? answers the question through word and deed. Alpers’s habit is to walk the reader through her own process of discovery, the noticing of some detail, the teasing out of unresolved questions. Chasing the answers may lead her to consider biography, social history, or the physicality of materials, but her catalyst is always looking.
As an undergraduate history and literature major at Radcliffe she was taught the practice of close reading, a habit of deliberate attention she took with her when she changed trajectory after an art history class her senior year. (“It was the concreteness that attracted me,” she explained in 1999. “And it still does.”) In graduate school “the teacher who meant the most” was Ernst Gombrich, in part for his attention to material particulars. Paintings are often talked about as if they were just images, but Alpers takes their full physicality under consideration: scale, surface, the wind-the-film-backward evidence of decisions made.
Her essay “No Telling, with Tiepolo” takes up an issue she had slid past in her earlier discussions of narrative painting: the conundrum that the more believable the scene before your eyes, the less it can tell you about action over time (hence the recourse to painting cycles and the reliance on familiar tales that viewers can fill out in their minds). Scrutinizing Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s theatrical diversion The Finding of Moses, she puts the question in palpable terms: “In what way and where is narrative lodged or located in painting itself?”
At eleven feet long, the Tiepolo cannot be taken in at a glance—“It is meant for eyes fitted with legs.” It was originally even longer and more eccentrically laid out. A flurry of action at the left—bawling baby, royal daughter, attendants of all shapes and sizes—was separated by a swath of uneventful landscape from a lone halberdier and dog entering at far right. What Alpers sees along that length is the unfurling not of a plot but of painterly invention. The figurative action registers a single moment, but the actions of the painter are revealed as we stroll along the canvas. (It is helpful to have access to the Internet and a decent monitor while reading this book. Though it includes black-and-white reproductions in the body text and color illustrations at the back, you will often want zoomable images of the artworks to see what Alpers is talking about.)
“Velázquez Is in the Details” considers the painter’s tactical use of small figures in the backgrounds of his pictures. The most famous example is the mirrored queen and king in Las Meninas, but he was already using the strategy in an early painting of women in a kitchen where a frame on (or in) the back wall reveals a miniature scene of Christ, Mary, and Martha. It’s present again, more elaborately, in The Spinners, whose foreground workshop scene opens onto a back room where diminutive figures of Arachne and Minerva examine a tapestry of Titian’s Rape of Europa.
Velázquez’s unexpected inversions of importance—gods and kings tiny and distant; laborers and children large and in the foreground—has attracted attention before, but Alpers is interested in the working of the paint itself, which necessarily becomes less fully illusionistic at small scale. Our focus is redirected to the physical matter and its manipulation, to the miracle by which a handful of deft marks can conjure a presence.
Reviewing Alpers’s 2005 book The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others in The Guardian, A.S. Byatt noted that Alpers “doesn’t use the techniques of psychoanalysis, or political theory, which tend to make all works seem the products of the same sorts of minds and problems.” Instead she cleaves to particulars. The best remedy for stale inferences, after all, is a good dose of defiant data, and artworks are the primary data of art history. Or that’s the theory.
In 1995 Alpers wondered where art history would turn once its “Italian center, the breeding ground and testing place of so much looking, thinking, and writing about art and its history, is no longer in place.” The answer was to other departments: linguistics for semiotics; psychology for Lacanian notions of the gaze and desire; Marxism for analyses of art locked, like everything else, into a system of economic possibilities and impossibilities. Each of these approaches came with fresh insights, along with fresh presumptions of universality. (Alpers once described the art historical adoption of semiotics as “new wine poured into an old bottle.”)
Her old bugbear, the habit of deferring to what is read rather than to what is seen, returned, and the hole left by Vasari was filled by the Frankfurt School. Once again students were taught how to interpret objects as markers for a theory rather than as distinct, recalcitrant things in themselves. In her Tiepolo essay she warned:
When the text is expanded to include the entirety of culture construed as a text;…when to take medium seriously is a formalist (essentialist) prejudice and a confirmation of the fetishistic nature of the object so considered and of the activity of attending to it—then the aesthetic and the difference between picture and text are no longer of much interest.
She chose to take early retirement from Berkeley before the turn of the millennium, in part, she says, because of the changing priorities of graduate students. After a lifetime in academe (her father, Wassily Leontief, was a Nobel Prize–winning economist who taught at Harvard) she moved to New York to lead what she describes as “a writer’s life.” An elliptical half-memoir, Roof Life, was published in 2013, a book on Walker Evans in 2020. She collaborated with the photographer Barney Kulok and the painter James Hyde on inkjet prints isolating details of Tiepolo paintings. (Kulok is also the publisher of the current book.) She wrote reviews for Artforum and other publications.
Many old-master art historians find themselves wrong-footed by contemporary art, but Alpers’s habits of slow looking serve her well. “Mainly, I write to clarify things for myself,” she tells Ulf Erdmann Ziegler in the book’s one interview, and it’s fun to watch her question her own responses, take things apart, look again. Her observation that “there is inevitably an aesthetic order and appeal to anything Hammons makes” struck me as obviously true and a remarkably succinct, overarching description of a defiantly elusive oeuvre that has ranged from body prints (his own), to a basketball hoop hung three stories above the ground, to the evanescent snowball sale.
And yet one gets the sense that she feels most alive when she’s picking a bit of a fight. Alpers is not averse to controversy, and her books have regularly been taken to task for a certain argumentative stridency. (Hilton Kramer labeled Rembrandt’s Enterprise of 1988 “wholly destructive,” which may well be a point of pride for her.) The Stanford professor and former Alpers student Richard Meyer observes that her “self-confidence, both on the page and in real life, is inspiring, occasionally maddening, and (for me) always daunting.” We can assume that she approves this assessment, since it appears in Meyer’s introduction to Is Art History?
In her writings, Alpers takes issue with various colleagues and mentors—many of them close friends who returned the favor. (See Gombrich’s review of The Art of Describing in these pages.)1 This is how knowledge is supposed to move forward: reasoning for or against someone’s methods or conclusions without impugning their character or overdramatizing the consequences of the difference of opinion. Maddening and daunting, perhaps, but not petty.
The most provocative inclusion for twenty-first-century readers is probably her previously unpublished lecture “Instances of Distance,” which ponders the challenges of first-world-meets-rest-of-world encounters in art. Half the talk addresses the much-debated question of how Western art museums and their audiences should view objects by makers (in this case the Baule people of Côte d’Ivoire) who have no equivalent practice of sticking things on pedestals for static, hands-off, aesthetic perusal. Her conclusion—that museums are full of things not made to be seen in this way, but looking gives us access to how other people deployed skills to create knowledge—will be familiar to those who follow discussions about the validity of the encyclopedic museum.
Further off the beaten path is her discussion of the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout, who in the 1640s made paintings of indigenous, African, and mixed-race people in Brazil.2 Commissioned by Count Johan Maurits, governor of the Netherlands’ short-lived colony there, each shows an individual in a tropical landscape with closely observed accessories. They are early examples of ethnographic depiction, but they take the remarkable form of standing, life-size portraits—a heroic mode usually reserved for the posh and powerful.
Though “not great works of art,” they struck her as “majestic in form and conception” when she saw them at an exhibition in Recife, where they had been made. (They normally live in Copenhagen.) She draws comparisons to a Frans Hals portrait of a Haarlem burgher—similar arrangements of flowers, weaponry, and distant landscapes—but with a critical difference: where the paint handling and attitude of the Hals suggest a sociable repartee between artist and sitter,
the detachment and coolness of Eckhout’s performance is striking…. He was devoted to depicting what is before the eyes, avoiding history, the suggestion of inner life, or his own relationship to the world. His portrayals…are remarkable as attentive and accepting paintings of a strange New World of human beings.
How accurate the paintings were as records of real people or the cultures they are taken to represent is to some degree unknowable. Of his Tapuya Man, Brasil, Alpers writes, “Eckhout paints the bound penis, pierced cheeks, and shaved eyebrows…without blinking,” but the severed human foot sticking out of a basket carried by Eckhout’s Tapuya Woman, Brasil, who also toys with a severed hand, is surely a fanciful nod to the tales of cannibalism he would have heard.
The problem for many contemporary viewers is that these pictures were underwritten by a malign system. European dealings with indigenous peoples were exploitative (to put it mildly), and Maurits—once admired for his interdenominational tolerance, his scientific curiosity, and his bijou palace in The Hague (now the Mauritshuis museum)—participated in the slave trade. Alpers is not oblivious to social issues; she takes note of both this history and the continuing racial realities of Recife, where the exhibition opening was staffed with nonwhite people serving white people looking at paintings of nonwhite people. But the question that interests her as an art historian is this: “Is condemnation of the…paintings as art called for?”
The entanglement of the Enlightenment’s search for knowledge with the imperial search for riches is not news, nor is the reality that admired art may be made by and for unadmirable people. As products of an unprecedented intercultural exchange, the Eckhout paintings are inevitably rife with ambivalent attraction, empirical curiosity, probable condescension, and self-serving agendas. But if you do a Google search on these paintings today you will find summaries like this, from Khan Academy: “Eckhout’s portrayals of the inhabitants of Brazil and Africa as inferior to Europeans served to justify and advocate for both the enslavement of Africans and the exploitation of the Brazilian land and its inhabitants.”
The evidence provided for this judgment is straightforwardly iconographic: exposed breasts are there to demean and sexualize female sitters; the near nudity of men is intended to mark them as uncivilized; weaponry is shown to demonstrate the sitter as a “threat…to the Dutch.” Whether any of these attributes were observed realities seems to be irrelevant to the conclusion. We are back where we began with the Bruegel: painting as monophonic text.
In his introduction Meyer notes that his
colleagues and students often sacrifice close visual attention in favor of sociopolitical agendas they see as illustrated or enacted by art. It is a pity that the relation between art and politics should be so flattened.
Art history may have learned to be reticent about normative aesthetic judgments, but normative moral judgments may still be delivered without compunction, even when applied to a world quite different from our own. If Alpers has taught us anything over her long career, it should be that paintings are not sermons, and that “to consider art as a human artifact which is not language expands a notion of human nature and of culture.”
What has drawn Alpers back repeatedly to the seventeenth century is its canny self-awareness about representation. Observing the oscillation between the material fact of paint and the illusion of an infanta’s sleeve, she stretches out and suggests that it is “emblematic of a problem inherent in the pictorial state, but also, I think, inherent in Velázquez’s sense of the human state.” Art gets at something words don’t about the cognitive and emotional experience of being human, and looking is how we get at art.
Is Art History? has a lot to say on a lot of subjects, some of it more welcoming to the general reader than other parts. It is helpful to have some Italian as well as a handle on the major players of twentieth-century art history (though anyone wanting a quick summa of those figures and their contributions could do worse than turn to Alpers’s “Style Is What You Make It: The Visual Arts Once Again”).
But this book doesn’t ask to be read front to back and cover to cover. With its bright red binding, lie-flat spine, and sewn-in grosgrain ribbon for marking your spot, it is thoughtfully designed for picking up and putting down by people who care about concreteness. And as Alpers once wrote about Vermeer’s The Music Lesson, “This is how the world is known: incompletely, and in pieces.”
