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Walker Evans
A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans Walker Evans (1903–75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans’s work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly ...
The Vexations of Art
Now available in paperback A major art historian reflects on a great tradition of European painting. "The Vexations of Art is an engrossing, passionate attempt to re-engage with painting as a mode of thought at a time when 'it is not clear in what form the resource of painting?for surely painting has been a singular resource of the greater European culture?will continue."?Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times "[A] fascinating book that will surely generate discussion for some time to come."?Mindy Nancarrow, Renaissance Quarterly
Roof Life
A celebrated art historian who has spent a lifetime looking at art writes about looking as a way of being in the world This is not a memoir. It does not take the form of a story. It is instead a kind of self-portrait, or perhaps several self-portraits. Svetlana Alpers had been keeping files: records of what she saw out the windows of her loft in New York; records of art sold, bought, or seen on her walls; records of foods found in markets and prepared in places where she lived; and records of herself seen in photographs, drawings, and paintings made by others. In solving the question of her father's place and date of birth, she reconstructs the life of her Russian grandfather in a distant an...
The Vexations of Art
"Alpers concentrates on the art of the seventeenth century, but also looks back and forward in time. She considers Velazquez as curator of the Spanish royal collection, which included many works by his admired predecessors Titian and Rubens. Velazquez also resembles Manet, and the affinity between the two painters is analyzed. Both worked in a tradition that assumed that there were persistent pictorial problems to take up. Inventive change was encouraged. Art such as this vexes or unsettles our view of the world even as it gives us reason to pause and look. The book concludes by asking whether painting continues to do that today." "This book reflects Alpers's close looking and long reflection upon a certain tradition of European painting. It illuminates the nature of what the most alert painters do, and why."--BOOK JACKET.
The Making of Rubens
The second problem is that of art and its consumption. Beginning with Watteau, the making of a Rubensian art is traced in the taste for Rubens in the eighteenth century in France, where many of the pictures he had kept for his own collection had found their way. In the writings of Roger de Piles and in the work of the painters to follow, art is made out of the viewing and discussing of art. A binary system of taste emerged for Rubens as contrasted with Poussin, and critical distinctions came to be fashioned in the binary terms of gender. Finally, Alpers considers creativity itself and how, as a man and as a painter, Rubens could have viewed his own generative talent. An analysis of his Munich Silenus - fleshy, intoxicated, and, following Virgil's account, disempowered as a condition of producing his songs - reveals a sense of the creative gift as humanly indeterminate and equivocal.
Rembrandt's Enterprise
Drawing on and furthering the enterprise of Rembrandt scholars, who have been reinterpreting the artist and his work over the past 25 years, Alpers presents new considerations about Rembrandt's handling of paint, his theatrical approach to his models, his use of his studio as an environment under his control, and his relationship to those who bought his work. Her study is timely in light of recent research showing that well-known works attributed to Rembrandt are by followers instead. Alpers developed her text from a lecture series, and the prose gains readability by retaining some of the flavor of a talk. Still, this will find its audience chiefly among scholars and specialists in the field. Kathryn W. Finkelstein, M. Ln., Cincinnati Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- From Library Journal.
Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence
Examines Tiepolo's works as examples of the specifically pictorial as distinct from the verbal intelligence. This study aims to show that Tiepolo's greatness lies not in stories told, or in meanings pursued, but in the use of the visual medium - drawing, painting, and natural light.
Vermeer's Hat
'Effortless and compelling, Brooks is a wonderful storyteller. I doubt I will read a better book this year.' Sunday Telegraph Each of Vermeer's paintings tells a story. In one, a military officer leans toward a laughing girl; in another, a woman stands by a window and weighs silver; in a third, fruit spills from a porcelain bowl onto a lavish Turkish carpet. Hiding in plain sight, these details hint at the intricate threads that bound Vermeer's world together - the officer's hat is made from North American beaver, bought with silver extracted from the mines of Peru, while beaver pelts were traded in their thousands for the Chinese porcelain so beloved by the Dutch in the Golden Age. From a view of Delft, Vermeer gives us the world. As a new Vermeer exhibition opens at the Rijksmuseum, the largest of its kind in history, Vermeer's Hat offers a fascinating perspective on how the burgeoning forces of trade and commerce shaped Vermeer's masterpieces.
Explanation and Value in the Arts
An interdisciplinary study of explanation and the construction of value regarding works of literature and painting.
