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

If the world were fair, Svetlana Leontief Alpers would have won a Nobel Prize by now, just like her dad. After all, Wassily Leontief merely pioneered in "the development of the input-output method and its application to important economic problems," as the Nobel Web site explains -- not research that speaks to most of us. His daughter, now 69 -- two years older than her father was when he got his Nobel in 1973 -- has managed to thoroughly rejig how people think about great works of art. And those are objects that can matter to us all.

Of course, part of the unfairness of the world is that there's no Nobel for people who study art, no matter what insights they've had.

Over the past few decades, Alpers has published a series of books that have revolutionized talk about Vermeer and Rembrandt and other Dutch masters. The standard way of getting at these artists had been to pick apart what their pictures mean -- their hidden symbolism, their political messages, their abstruse theology. Alpers took a different tack. She argued that Dutch culture of the time had a novel outlook on the world that favored sight and optics and all kinds of scientific observation, and that this outlook is echoed in the way its paintings look -- the way someone might argue that watching television has changed both how we view the world and what we like in art.

For Alpers, you don't look through a picture to find meaning lurking underneath. You take in what it looks like and try to see how that jibes with what's happening in the world around the artist.

A brand-new Alpers book called "The Vexations of Art" takes that approach and applies it even more widely. It covers figures as diverse as Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez and Manet. It's already getting raves, including from lay people such as British author A.S. Byatt, who recently reviewed it for the Guardian in London.

As Byatt puts it, Alpers "uses history to make things strange." Her approach has always been to find aspects of art we're likely to take for granted and show how they're the peculiar products of one time and place. Alpers, for instance, once took the Dutch taste for detail-filled still lifes -- which can seem so obviously attractive and worth looking at that there's nothing there to explain -- and connected it to Dutch scientists' belief that looking at the surface of the world and trusting what you see there would give you insight into how things work.

On meeting Alpers, you feel she knows what a rare mind she has. Her manner can be fierce, almost regal, even though she does her very best to hide the fact that she is likely brighter than the person she is with. You imagine her long ago at private school in Cambridge, Mass., the daughter of a leading Harvard professor -- himself the son of academic Russian emigres -- slowly learning to have patience with her less brainy, less sophisticated classmates. Classmates, maybe, who didn't count artists such as Mark Rothko and Herbert Ferber as part of their social set. Who, perhaps, hadn't won the admiration of a leading man of letters -- as Alpers did one summer in Salzburg when she hung out with poet Randall Jarrell. She was 12 and he was 34.

Alpers says she doesn't remember feeling that her childhood was anything special. Which shows just what a peculiar kid she must have been.

Now, at the other end of an impressive career, Alpers doesn't so much demand a certain deference as seem absolutely used to getting it.

On a late-summer weekend in New York, Alpers received a visiting critic, ushering him into the ninth-floor loft she's been living in for five years. It's tucked up under the roof of a converted factory just off Union Square. (She took early retirement from Berkeley in 1994, accepting the generous golden handshake the university was offering to senior faculty. She'd arrived in 1962 with her then-husband, Paul Alpers, who'd landed a job teaching literature.)

Alpers, a smallish, compact woman, wore a tailored summer suit made of fine cotton that was almost seersucker. She had on thick-soled, two-tone heels that might have been by Prada or some other with-it label. Her hair was gray, worn short with a touch of matronly severity but also with a certain sportiness to it.

Overall, Alpers is more stylish than you might expect for a major scholar of Old Master art. A rigorously modern chair by Mies van der Rohe and a biomorphic table by Isamu Noguchi fill one corner of her loft. They face an aggressive oil painting, of a balding man wedged into the corner of an art gallery, by New Yorker Alexi Worth, an emerging artist Alpers has befriended since her move East. (As he tells it, he grilled her after one of her talks, and she took up his challenge.)