As the title suggests, Is Art History? Selected Writings collects a representative array of academic articles, catalog essays, lectures, and reviews by the art historian Svetlana Alpers on a variety of topics well beyond her transformative contributions to the study of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Much to the credit of this edited collection, it compellingly demonstrates how her work on Dutch topics was part of a systematic reappraisal of art historical methodology with implications for early-modern painters from Diego Velázquez and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to Jean-Simeon Chardin, as well as modern and contemporary artists such as Bradley Walker Tomlin, Catherine Murphy, and Barney Kulok (her friend who wrote the foreword to the present publication). The temporal range of the texts, covering a span of roughly sixty years from 1960 to 2023, implicitly situates the reader in the important historical trajectories of the discipline as scholars, including Alpers, engaged and consequently shaped second-wave feminist critique, the “visual turn” in art history, and the corresponding ascendance of the American academy in relation to the longstanding European tradition of connoisseurship and iconographical analysis. In short, the publication under review is essential reading, particularly for the younger generation of art historians who may otherwise take for granted the singular nature of Alpers’s contribution to these developments that necessarily inform any research undertaken today.

It is impossible to discuss each of the forty-one texts compiled in the collection, thus the present reviewer will attempt to address those contributions that broadly connect to Alpers’s most longstanding critical themes. In this respect, the first article in the collection, “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives,” published in 1960 from an earlier seminar paper written at Harvard under her mentor Ernst Gombrich, sets the stage for her decades-long critical confrontation with the position of Renaissance Italian art as the principal frame of reference for art historical analysis. Alpers argues, in effect, that Giorgio Vasari was not a dispassionate observer of the art of his time, rather than engaging in the classical convention of ekphrasis, or vivid description of an artwork. This model was useful for his collected artist biographies, the Lives, but it had the impact of prioritizing those artistic products for which ekphrasis was most productive, namely, narrative and allegorical subjects. In other words, she localizes and historicizes Vasari in the context of his immediate concerns and renders him unique rather than typical. The unspoken follow-up question for the reader is as follows: with Vasari so delimited to his time and place, what are the alternative models for understanding art in other times and other places?

The following article, “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,” provides an early answer. Published in 1972–73, it diverges from the standard view that Pieter Bruegel’s The Wedding Dance in Detroit is primarily a moralizing allegory of vice. Alpers proposes instead that we consider the painting in light of its social context. Accordingly, she mobilizes the idea of a “comic” mode that does not mock the peasants per se but does justice to the permissible fun of a Netherlandish wedding and its implication of rural prosperity. Tacit in this argument is a rejection of allegorical and narrative meaning as the only possible interpretative pathway—those ekphrastic categories of representation earlier seen in her treatment of Vasari—and which art historians had uncritically adopted as their primary method of locating significance in a work of art. Such an attitude would become more explicit in another article of 1976, “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Interpretation,” in which she posits that the Renaissance linkage of verisimilitude and narration, as earlier explored with respect to Vasari, contained within it the possibility of descriptive art that reveled in representation as such. She crucially separates these nonnarrative subjects—largely genre scenes here—from similar subjects that populate subsequent nineteenth-century “Realism.” Where the latter representations demonstrate a new ambivalence around the ability of painting to convey the modern condition, the early-modern descriptive moment expressed supreme confidence in the all-encompassing power of paint to depict the visible world. While “description” is the principal thrust of Alpers’s landmark book of 1983, The Art of Describing, which fundamentally altered the basic vocabulary with which art historians today discuss Dutch art, the earlier article notably implicates a diverse cast of artists including Caravaggio and Velázquez. In the latter case, the collection does justice to Alpers’s longstanding engagement with that artist by including a 2006 lecture “Velázquez is in the Details,” in which she examines the semantic potential of his painterly facture.

The essays collected here likewise draw attention to the feminist implications of Alpers’s more well-known studies of Dutch art. In the lecture delivered at the Women’s Caucus for Art at the College Art Association conference of 1978, “Art History and Its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art,” Alpers linked her innovative approach to Dutch art with the contemporaneous political project of greater female representation in art history. Although challenging what she views as Linda Nochlin’s tacit acceptance of the art-historical superstructure in which women artists must be situated, Alpers praises in equal measure Nochlin’s observation that the historical notion of artistic greatness places a negative constraint on women’s inclusion in the artistic cannon. Alpers superimposes this dilemma on her own study of Dutch art, as the latter similarly suffered from interpretation through the restrictive lens of Renaissance Italian artistic models that framed it dismissively as a “woman’s art.” She reclaims this moniker in her discussion of Johannes Vermeer, whose scenes of female interiority and psychological distance from the viewer contrast with Albertian linear perspective as an implicitly male form of visual possession. While this may seem to some readers an oversimplification, Alpers equally sits with the tensions produced by these categorical distinctions, as in the 2021 catalog essay, “Chardin’s La Raie.” In this instance, she notes that the “Northern” descriptive genre of still life incongruously collides with a subject of female animal violence, as the represented ray has been sliced open, so its egg pouch appears exposed to the viewer. Alpers describes the scene as a “martyrdom,” and thus retrieves a quasi-narrative tacitly aligned not with proto-feminist description, but with the male-dominated institutional space for which the painting was destined, the French Royal Academy.

Another thematic consideration animating this collection is the evolution of art history and its methods in the United States over the course of Alpers’s career. The essay that gives this publication its name, Is Art History? originally published in 1977, locates Alpers at the forefront of the new social history of art. Intimately linked to the rise of visual culture studies, the new art history became less concerned with aesthetic hierarchies and submitting objects to the grand narratives of historical style and iconographical analysis, as practiced by the earlier European art historians Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky, respectively. Instead, the new generation of American art historians including Alpers and her longtime Berkeley colleague Michael Baxandall emplaced art and images within their social context. Such a strategy, of course, implied an interdisciplinarity that threatened the boundaries of art history itself, as Alpers acknowledges in a subsequent description of an introductory course at Berkeley in 1995. “The Making of Art History 15” describes a revamped course that invited an archaeologist, psychologist, and philosopher, among others, to lecture on art and appealed to undergraduate students who increasingly double-majored in art history and a secondary field. A subsequent lecture, “What are we looking for? Expectations in Art History,” reprises many of these themes.

The collection likewise traces Alpers’s engagement with subsequent transformations in art history in which she was a commentator, if not a central figure, primarily regarding the global turn and social justice issues of racial equity and representation. “Instances of Distance: Eckhout in Brazil and the Baule in the Museum,” an edited pair of lectures, challenges the tendency toward condemnation in Albert Eckhout’s visual production, instead pleading for consideration of the work the images perform as art. In one particularly striking passage, Alpers draws attention to the ennobling effect of Eckhout’s full-length oil portrait of a Tapuya native and compares it to Frans Hals’s only full-length portrait of a Dutch burgher, arguing in effect that the global cannot be separated from the local and shed light on each other. In her 2023 review of the recent Juan de Pareja exhibition at the Met, she similarly challenges what she describes as “the danger of confusing pictorial authority with enslavement,” in reference to Velázquez’s representation of his eponymous slave and studio assistant.

In the sheer confidence of her written voice, Alpers risks alienating readers on these sensitive issues. As recounted in a book review, “David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale,” she describes sharing, to great protest from a curator with whom she had this conversation, that she sensed anger at the position of Black people in America in Hammons’s work. At issue in the exchange was Alpers’s assumption of scholarly authority taking the place of direct knowledge of the artist. In this respect, the newly published collection likewise marks another historical transition of the present day, namely, the changed position of the public intellectual in the face of our society’s most pressing problems and who has a right to possess thoughts on them. Readers of this collection will of course reach different conclusions on this count, but I expect that they will aspire to the high level of thought on these issues that Alpers had an outsize role in encouraging in the first place.