Svetlana Alpers

Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

The Art of Describing

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 international circle. Alpers demonstrates that Evans’s practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans’s dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists—from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner—underscoring how Evans’s travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style. A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world—to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.

Starting from Scratch

Walker Evans

Arte de Descrever: A Arte Holandesa no Século XVII, A

Examines the influence of culture, science, and technology on the art of Dutch painters, including Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Rubens

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

Velázquez and Others

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.

Michael Baxandall

Tiepolo is a brilliant example of the specifically pictorial intelligence. This book is both a study of his art and an argument for fuller recognition of the peculiarities of the painter's representational medium. Alpers and Baxandall locate distinctive modes of Tiepolo's representation of the world and human action; follow his process of invention from first pen drawings, through small oil sketches, to great frescoes; and analyse his best and biggest painting, the Four Continents in the Stairway Hall of the Prince-Bishop's Residence at Wurzburg, illustrated with photographs specially taken for the book. The topics taken up include: painting's resistance to enacted narrative drama, its engagement with indeterminacies and repetitions, the senses in which a painter may 'perform' both past art and himself, the constructive roles of gestural drawing, exploitation of shifts of scale between design and finished work, dialogue between the changing natural site lighting and in-picture lighting, contributions made by the beholder's own mobility, the expressive scope of tensions between two and three dimensions, the deep rationale of rococo formal structure, and the sources of the moral force of pictures without an explicit moral. The book - both art criticism and a practical polemic - ends with an annotated gazetteer for travellers, listing those Tiepolo paintings that can still be seen in the places and conditions for which he painted them.

Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence

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.

The Making of Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens

The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada

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.

Svetlana Alpers

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