The University of Amsterdam hosts a symposium dedicated to the work of Svetlana Alpers (Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley). Her books on early modern painting are not easy to categorize within traditional strands of scholarship but share a progressive approach to their subjects. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983) turned attention away from iconography to questions about the look and nature of Dutch painting. Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988) analyzed the master’s work in terms of his performance on the market. More recently, Alpers has expanded her view to Italian art in Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994, with Michael Baxandall), to Spanish art in The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (2005), and she has now turned to the making and discussing of art today.

Svetlana Alpers will participate in a multidisciplinary assembly of visual artist and researchers who have affinity with her thinking. She will discuss a selection of works from the Renaissance to the present. Her guests are the artist Jan Andriesse, historian Rudolf Dekker, artist Jan Dibbets, painter Marlene Dumas, art historian Rudi Fuchs, film maker Maarten de Kroon, and cultural historian Lotte van de Pol.

Supported by:

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History

Amsterdam Centre for the Study of the Golden Age