Svetlana Alpers

Svetlana Leontief Alpers (born February 10, 1936) is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1983 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others, and is one of the most influential American art historians of her generation.

Svetlana Alpers received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1957 and a Ph.D.from Harvard in 1965. She was a professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley from 1962 to 1998, and by 1994 she was named Professor Emerita.

In 1983 Alpers co-founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations with American literary critic Stephen Greenblatt.

In 2007 she collaborated with artists James Hyde and Barney Kulok on a project entitled Painting Then for Now. The project consists of 19 photographic prints based on the suite of three paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo that hang at the top of the main staircase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The project was exhibited at David Krut Gallery, NY. Six of the prints were later acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

In Spring 2014 Alpers was made an officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republique Francaise. On May 28, 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard University.

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