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

Such special respect for her opinion dates from 1983, when Alpers was already well into her Berkeley career. In that year, she published "The Art of Describing," the groundbreaking book that shot her to academic stardom. It was sparked, she says, by a eureka moment in front of a reproduction of a famous Vermeer called "The Art of Painting." (She still keeps a picture of that work above her desk in New York.)

The picture shows an artist at his easel, busily painting a young woman who is crowned with laurel and holds a trumpet and a book, and who poses before a huge map of the Netherlands. But instead of hunting for hidden symbols in all the painting's many obscure details, which would have been the accepted thing to do, Alpers says she began to think "that is not about meaning . . . it's descriptive."

The picture's significance and excellence didn't depend on getting its viewers to catalogue, and then decipher, the "meaning" of the scene that's shown in it: what the book and trumpet symbolize, and what that map is really all about. Instead, Alpers came to see this picture, and the entire realist tradition that it's a part of, as coming out of a culture that paid special attention to looking at the world, and to what our eyes can tell us about it. Her book linked Vermeer and his Dutch peers, busy making pictures that seem designed to capture the fabric of reality, to the early cartographers and microscopists, also Dutch, who were digging deep into the way things are and look.

"I didn't look at Vermeer's 'Art of Painting' and think, 'I'd better get working on cartography.' " That's what your standard social historian of art might have done, after noticing that there's a map in the picture's background. "I thought, 'There's something maplike about that [painting],' then looked at cartography. It was a pictorial insight into the picture, into what Vermeer painted, not a cultural insight. And it always comes back to the painting."

That is, the point of looking at Vermeer's society was to understand the art by understanding how it participated in a larger cultural milieu. To understand, for example, how the incident-filled canvas of a Dutch painter seems to parallel the way Dutch cartographers spread information out across a surface, and how Dutch scientists peered closely at the splendors of nature.

"The Art of Describing," with its new, culture-bound but picture-centric way of looking at paintings, made a huge splash.

A book review by Ernst Gombrich, a towering figure in art history and once a mentor of Alpers's -- he taught briefly at Harvard while she was getting her doctorate there -- had some quite substantial criticism of the work but predicted, quite correctly, that because of it "the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated."

Even historian Simon Schama, who took serious issue with many of the book's details, said it had "a pungency and intellectual density that set it apart from the more leisurely and cautious conventions of art historical scholarship" and described the "sudden cold shower" that it brought to the study of Dutch art.

According to Mariet Westermann, an art historian from Holland who is now director of the prestigious Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Alpers's approach is "extremely influential." Even though "The Art of Describing" is now 20 years old, Westermann says, she still assigns it to her students and would be happy to see them someday extend its methods to new areas: Why not a new, Alpersian study of Japanese art?

Though she faults Alpers for the strength of her polemics -- Alpers's writing often seems spoiling for a fight, and that predisposes other scholars to resist its claims -- Westermann values her colleague "as a great defender of art history as a discipline centrally focused on the visual arts, and not on texts, or on all the other stuff that is brought into it from the outside to explain the art, or give us purchase on the art."

As a historian, Westermann says, Alpers can have her flaws -- rival scholars have pointed them out at vast, sometimes pedantic length. But as an inspired and inspiring looker, there aren't many like her.