“Looking as Knowing”: Svetlana Alpers on Critical Thinking and Photography

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Svetlana Alpers, a specialist of Dutch Golden Age painting and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. In this conversation, Svetlana shares how literary criticism influenced her early encounters with art and reflects on her intellectual formation at Harvard in the 1960s, and her role forming the art history department at Berkeley. She reflects on the altered state of the discipline today, and levels a critique of the turn towards global art history. Finally, they discuss the relation between painting and photography in light of her new book on Walker Evans, and Svetlana draws out parallels between this new project and her seminal book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century.