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Is Art History? A Panel Discussion on the Selected Writings of Svetlana Alpers
Scholars Evelyn Lincoln (Brown) and Richard Meyer (Stanford) join one of the most renowned art historians of the past century, Svetlana Alpers, to discuss a newly published volume of her selected writings.
Is Art History? is a definitive volume of writings by one of the most renowned art historians of the past century. The book brings together Alperss contributions to the art historical discipline and her considerations of the continuing possibilities of painting as an art. Her writing spans over six decades beginning with seminal essays written in examination of the constraints of her chosen discipline, including a foundational essay on Vasari (1960), "Is Art History?" (1970), "Style is What You Make IT" (1979), and "Art History and Its Exclusions" (1982); two influential but never before published lectures and other unpublished public presentations; notable critical essays on art, and recent texts on contemporary artists including Alex Katz, Catherine Murphy and Shirley Jaffe and others. Is Art History? also includes new prefatory notes written by the author for this occasion, an unexpected introduction by her former student the esteemed scholar-critic Richard Meyer (Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History, Stanford University), and a revealing interview with the German author and critic Ulf Erdmann Ziegler. This extensive view of Alperss prolific and varied career appeals both to new readers in need of an introduction as well as to audiences familiar with her stimulating writing on the great European tradition of painting.
Svetlana Alpers (BA Radcliffe College, PhD. Harvard University) is the author of The Art of Describing, Rembrandts Enterprise, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (with Michael Baxandall), The Making of Rubens, The Vexations of Art, Roof Life, and most recently Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch. Alpers taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1962-94 and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including being named a Fellow of the American Academy of Art and Sciences, The American Philosophical Society, an officier of the French lOrdre des Art and Lettres, a corresponding member of the British Academy and of the Royal Academy of Art. Most recently she was the recipient of the 2023 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from the College Art Association and the 2024 Silvers-Dudley Prize for Arts Writing. Alpers co-founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations in 1983. She is Professor Emerita at University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the Department of Art History, New York University.
Evelyn Lincoln is professor emerita at Brown University, where she taught in the Departments of the History of Art & Architecture and Italian Studies since 1994. In that year, she received her doctorate from the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, where she had the opportunity to study with Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers and a few other remarkable historians and art historians, writing a dissertation about Italian craftsmen and women who used drawing (or, disegno) in the course of their careers, and became the first Italian printmakers. This was the material for her first book, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (Yale UP, 2000), which made her curious about the reception of prints, and led to her next book on readers' engagements with illustrated dialogues in Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome (Yale UP: 2014). Her abiding interest in the role of printmaking in forging communities of readers, writers and artists in the early modern world is the impetus for her current book, The View from 1600: The Parasole Family Roman Woodblock Enterprise, soon coming out with Routledge Press.
Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University. He is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art and What was Contemporary Art?, With Peggy Phelan, he co-edited Contact Warhol: Photography Without End and co-organized the exhibition of the same title. With Catherine Lord, he co-wrote Art and Queer Culture, a survey of art and alternative sexuality since 1885. He recently submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court for a case regarding Andy Warhol and fair use Meyers book Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (MIT Press: 2022) is a study of a Brooklyn tailor and slipper-maker who, against all odds, achieved international recognition as a self-taught painter in the 1940s. The New Yorker named Master of the Two Left Feet one of the Best Books of 2022, Hyperallergic cited it as one of the ten best books of the year, and the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) called it superb. The book received the 2023 Dedalus Foundation Award for an outstanding exhibition catalogue that makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of modern art or modernism. Coinciding with the books publication, Meyer curated Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, a retrospective at the American Folk Art Museum in New York on display from September 2022 January 2023. A review in the New York Times described the show as one of the seasons best and the Wall Street Journal told readers Dont miss it. An expanded version of the show including paintings by Piet Mondrian, Yves Tanguy, and Joan Miro (all of whom were in conversation with Hirshfields art in the 1940s), was on display at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford from September 2023-January 2024.
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LocationSVA Beatrice Theatre (View)
333 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
United States
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