The Vexations of Art; Velázquez and Others

by Svetlana Alpers

• ISBN13: 9780300108255
• ISBN10: 0300108257
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2005-09-08
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Velazquez is often considered an artist apart: great, but isolated in a palace/ museum in Spain. This highly original book sets him in conjunction with certain conditions of painting in his time and after. From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, roughly from Rembrandt and Vermeer to Matisse and Picasso, a succession of European painters has taken the studio as the world; that is, the studio is where the worldas it gets into paintingis experienced. Svetlana Alpers first focuses on this retreat into the confines of the studio, then looks at the ways in which the paintings of the Dutch masters and Velazquez acknowledge war and rivalry while offering a way out. The final chapters give a new account of Velazquez'sThe Spinners, a ravishing painting which has been eclipsed by interest in the enigmas ofLas Meninas.Alpers concentrates on the seventeenth century but also looks back to Velazquez's predecessors Titian and Rubens and forward to his modern successors. She discusses Velazquez's resemblance to Manet, whose art also vexes or unsettles, giving us reason to pause and look. The book concludes by asking whether painting continues to do that today.

Author Biography

Svetlana Alpers is Professor Emerita of the History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Fine Arts, New York University.