Svetlana Alpers is an American art historian, professor, and critic. She received a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe college in 1957 and a PhD in art history from Harvard University in 1965. From 1962 to 1994, she taught art history at the University of California, Berkeley, and has served as a professor emerita there since. Alpers gained notoriety for her innovative approach art history and scholarship on the Dutch baroque period. In 1977, she cofounded the interdisciplinary journal Representations and published the book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Her article “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” which explores the way museums transform objects into art, appeared in 1991. She has published widely, including articles in the Art Journal, Daedalus, and Feminism and Art History; and art criticism in Artforum, Burlington Magazine, London Review of Books, and The New Republic. She is also the author of Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988) and Making Rubens (1995), and co-author with Michael Baxandall of Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994).
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