Svetlana Alpers

Svetlana Alpers (née Leontieva, in English Svetlana Leontief Alpers; born February 10, 1936, Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an American historian of European painting and art theorist.

She received her PhD in 1965 and taught at the University of California, Berkeley for about three decades. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991) and the American Philosophical Society (2011)[1], and a corresponding member of the British Academy (2014).

She is the daughter of economist Vasily Leontief, later a Nobel laureate, and American poet Estelle Helen Marks.

She graduated from Radcliffe College (1957), where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received her doctorate from Harvard (1965), where she studied under Ernst Gombrich. From 1962 to 1998, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been professor emerita since 1994. She has taught at Princeton, Stanford, The Hague, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere. She has served as a consultant to National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1983, she was one of the founders of the interdisciplinary theoretical journal Representations, in whose first issue she published the programmatic article “Interpretation without Representation: Looking at Las Meninas.” She has also published in October, among other journals.

Research interests A specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch art, she is the author of seminal works on Rembrandt and Rubens, as well as studies of Vermeer, Velázquez, Tiepolo, and others, translated into the major European languages. She also appears as a theorist of visual culture and an opponent of iconology. “One of the most influential art historians of her generation,” she was described as when Harvard University announced the awarding of an honorary Doctor of Arts degree in 2015.