The Keen Art Insight Of Svetlana Alpers: It's All on the Surface

In her retirement, Alpers says, she feels drawn to the world of contemporary artists, and more welcome there than in academia. "I am trying -- and everybody who writes about art would not say this -- to give an account of what the artist does. . . . That probably does strike a note with practicing artists." Whereas, she points out with maybe a touch of bitterness, "many of the academic experts have been disappointed or disturbed by what I write." But then, as Alpers says, "you can't write anything first-rate without getting attacked."

When Alpers's book "Rembrandt's Enterprise" came out in 1988, she faced attacks she hadn't expected. She tells how an old-school Rembrandt connoisseur, who was supposed to write a letter of support for her, demurred: "We're busy cleaning up Rembrandt, and you're messing him up again."

For Alpers, Rembrandt wasn't the sensitive, humane soul of old-fashioned art appreciation. She says the view of Rembrandt that makes most sense to her is as "a kind of tough cookie -- not a nice guy."

Her book portrayed him as an eager participant in the cutthroat mercantile world of 17th-century Holland. The look of his pictures, Alpers argued, relates toideas about a new kind of man: independent, self-made and entrepreneurial, trading in new types of commodities. In Rembrandt's case, the novel trade goods that will guarantee such capitalist independence -- the painter's independence, in life and art -- are pictures painted in a trademark style that's about the raw material of paint, to which value is visibly added by the master's brush. And they sometimes depict just those freewheeling, self-contained individuals Dutch culture was starting to value -- including Rembrandt the entrepreneur himself, as seen in all those famous and very salable self-portraits.

Alpers's work "gets people's attention," says Perry Chapman, speaking on the phone. She's a leading Rembrandt scholar who just completed a year of research in Washington as a senior fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery. "And it outrages people sometimes. The more you know about the subject, the more you want to argue with either the finer points or the broad conclusions. But it's just so wonderfully provocative, and galvanizing, for the field."

And that's from someone who considers herself more or less opposed to many of Alpers's ideas.

Alpers's latest book should keep up the provocation. "Vexations" begins by addressing the apparently banal fact that artists work in a special space we call the studio and asks us to see that space as another strange and wonderful invention, with consequences for the last 400 or so years of Western art. She draws analogies between the studio and the science lab, and talks about the way the world is probed and tested -- "vexed," in the language of early scientist Francis Bacon -- in both. Severed from the world outside, the studio lets artists bring bits of that outside world into a controlled environment where they can be studied and rethought.

When Rembrandt brings a nude into the studio, Alpers would claim, the painting isn't supposed to be about portraying reality as it's found out in the wild, any more than a petri dish captures the real ecosystem of, say, a toilet seat. The painting is about the strangeness of that "experimental" act, and about using its artificial "vexing" of reality to gain insights into both humanity and art.

Alpers's recent work tends to impress -- or provoke -- by virtue of its complex arguments and subtle observations. Thirty years ago, when she was first making a name, her provocations were rather more direct. Her most famous and contentious move was to debunk the hunt for hidden meaning that for years had dominated the study of Dutch paintings, and that still dominates some museums' wall texts and docent talks about them. She insists that what's visible right there on the surface, analyzed with care and in great depth, is what matters most. We need to "fix our gaze, as the Dutch artists fixed theirs, on the representation of the stuffs and makings in the world rather than searching beneath their surfaces," she once wrote.

To take a painting of feasting peasants by Pieter Brueghel, in which there's revelry and celebration both in the picture's subject and its lively style, and then read it as a finger-wagging, symbol-filled rejection of the heartiness it shows -- as signaling a puritanical, sermonizing rejection of the things of this world -- does obvious violence to the look and feel of the artwork, in Alpers's view. It refuses to acknowledge what the picture itself seems to tell us about how much Dutch artists loved the world around them, and loved depicting it. Even if there were old texts that gave such symbolic readings of Dutch pictures -- and Alpers insists that there aren't, and that the moralizing texts that do get cited were never meant to be applied to art -- they wouldn't be worth paying attention to if they ran counter to what a viewer sees and feels when faced with the work. "What's important is the look of the thing. This is not a verbal artifact, it's a pictorial artifact, and words are secondary to the look of it," Alpers says.

Alpers's radical close looking -- near kin to the close reading she learned while earning a BA in literature at Radcliffe and which, as she points out, her colleagues in English departments have been doing for many decades -- has become something of a model in her discipline.

Last April, when the National Gallery held a two-day symposium in celebration of the 25th anniversary of its center for advanced study, Alpers, once on the center's board, was one invitee. Though the crowd included many of the leading figures in art history, no one else received the deference she did. She mostly kept clear of the glad-handing and networking that other big-name scholars got up to at the event. (Alpers says she isn't "clubbable.") But for all the social distance that she kept, every now and then a speaker at the lectern would look up to where Alpers sat, usually toward the back of the auditorium and often by herself, and ask, "Svetlana, would you tell us what you think?"