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The Making of Rubens
Rubens has long been considered a remarkably successful, prolific, and fleshly painter, a frequenter of the courts of the great. He is more admired than loved in our time, in contrast to the troubled figure of Rembrandt. This book takes up basic questions about Rubens's art and life, studies two of his bacchic paintings in detail, and discovers him in a less easy and more identifiably modern predicament.
The first problem Alpers addresses is one of the relationship between making art and national consciousness. Why and how did Rubens paint the revelling Flemish peasants in the great Louvre Kermis? The circumstances, tone, and feeling of this picture are investigated and found to involve deep ambivalences that are political, social, and aesthetic.
The second problem is that of art and its consumption. Beginning with Watteau, the making of a Rubensian art is traced in the taste for Rubens in the eighteenth century in France, where many of the pictures he had kept for his own collection had found their way. In the writings of Roger de Piles and in the work of the painters to follow, art is made out of the viewing and discussing of art. A binary system of taste emerged for Rubens as contrasted with Poussin, and critical distinctions came to be fashioned in the binary terms of gender.
Finally, Alpers considers creativity itself and how, as a man and as a painter, Rubens could have viewed his own generative talent. An analysis of his Munich Silenus - fleshy, intoxicated, and, following Virgil's account, disempowered as a condition of producing his songs - reveals a sense of the creative gift as humanly indeterminate and equivocal.
Fully illustrated with many drawings and paintings in color, this book complicates and deepens the interest of Rubens and of his works.
The first problem Alpers addresses is one of the relationship between making art and national consciousness. Why and how did Rubens paint the revelling Flemish peasants in the great Louvre Kermis? The circumstances, tone, and feeling of this picture are investigated and found to involve deep ambivalences that are political, social, and aesthetic.
The second problem is that of art and its consumption. Beginning with Watteau, the making of a Rubensian art is traced in the taste for Rubens in the eighteenth century in France, where many of the pictures he had kept for his own collection had found their way. In the writings of Roger de Piles and in the work of the painters to follow, art is made out of the viewing and discussing of art. A binary system of taste emerged for Rubens as contrasted with Poussin, and critical distinctions came to be fashioned in the binary terms of gender.
Finally, Alpers considers creativity itself and how, as a man and as a painter, Rubens could have viewed his own generative talent. An analysis of his Munich Silenus - fleshy, intoxicated, and, following Virgil's account, disempowered as a condition of producing his songs - reveals a sense of the creative gift as humanly indeterminate and equivocal.
Fully illustrated with many drawings and paintings in color, this book complicates and deepens the interest of Rubens and of his works.
- GenresArtArt History
186 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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45 people want to read
About the author
Svetlana Alpers
24 books24 followersScholar of Dutch baroque art; professor of History of Art, UC Berkeley,1962-1994; exponent of the "new art history."
Born Sventlana Leontief, she graduated from Radcliffe College with a B.A. in 1957. She married the following year, assuming her husband's surname of Alpers. She continued graduate work in art history at Harvard University publishin an article on Vasari's verbal descriptions of art (ekphraseis) in 1960 in the Journal of the Warburg and Coutauld Institutes, which announced her innovative approach to art history. Alpers accepted a teaching position as an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 while working on her dissertation. She graduated from Harvard in 1965, writing her thesis under Seymour Slive on the Peter Paul Rubens cycle Torre de la Parada. Her work in Rubens' archives brought her to the attention of Roger d'Hulst, who suggested she turn her dissertation into a volume for the catalogue raissoné on Rubens. She rose to the rank of Professor at Berkeley. In 1971 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of the College Art Associate (remained until 1976). That same year here volume for the Rubens catalogue raissoné, The Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, number nine, was published.
In 1977 an important methodological article by Alpers appeared in Daedalus examining progressive scholarship in art history in contrast with earlier scholarship. During the academic year 1979-80 she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1983, Alpers co-founded the progressive interdisciplinary journal Representations, publishing the article, "Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas," in the first issue. That year, too, she published the first of her ground-breaking works in art history, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. The book's central thesis focused on the the immediacy and simplicity of Dutch painting and the Dutch preoccupation with the description of interiors and domestic scenes, contrasting it with narrative Italian painting. Iconographical approaches to baroque art, she wrote, such as those practiced by Erwin Panofsky and others, were insufficient to understand Dutch imagery. Her book likewise criticized mainstream Dutch scholarship and its reliance on emblems and emblemata books explain Netherlandish still life paining. The Art of Describing was well received, reviewers hailing Alper's mastery of topics as diverse as optics and perspective theory. Critics, however, accused her of selective use of evidence, drawing only from paintings and texts which supported her theories.
In 1988, during the era of shocking reattributions of many works of Rembrandt by the Rembrandt Research Project, Alpers published a monograph on the artist, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market The book examined Rembrandt's market strategies and his modeling his art to appeal to a Dutch consumer base. Her use of economic theory and a concerted avoidance of visual criteria again upset traditionalists in the art world.
Alpers co-wrote a book with fellow Berkeley art historian Michael Baxandall in 1994, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. She was named Professor Emerita from Berkeley in 1994. The following year she returned to the art of the low countries with her Making of Rubens. The book looked at Rubens' politics, his later critical reception in France, and theorized specific meaning in the recurring Silenus figures of his later work.
Reaction to Alpers was summed up by Walter Liedtke. In an article on American historians of Dutch art, he characterized her work as containing "whole exclusions" of art that did not fit her thesis--such as the Utrecht school--a "typical exercise in American taste dressed up (with some French motifs) as a new analysis of Dutch Art." However, her work Rembrandt's Enterprise was included among the 169 major writings of art history in the 2010 Hauptwerke der Kunstgeschicht
Born Sventlana Leontief, she graduated from Radcliffe College with a B.A. in 1957. She married the following year, assuming her husband's surname of Alpers. She continued graduate work in art history at Harvard University publishin an article on Vasari's verbal descriptions of art (ekphraseis) in 1960 in the Journal of the Warburg and Coutauld Institutes, which announced her innovative approach to art history. Alpers accepted a teaching position as an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 while working on her dissertation. She graduated from Harvard in 1965, writing her thesis under Seymour Slive on the Peter Paul Rubens cycle Torre de la Parada. Her work in Rubens' archives brought her to the attention of Roger d'Hulst, who suggested she turn her dissertation into a volume for the catalogue raissoné on Rubens. She rose to the rank of Professor at Berkeley. In 1971 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of the College Art Associate (remained until 1976). That same year here volume for the Rubens catalogue raissoné, The Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, number nine, was published.
In 1977 an important methodological article by Alpers appeared in Daedalus examining progressive scholarship in art history in contrast with earlier scholarship. During the academic year 1979-80 she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1983, Alpers co-founded the progressive interdisciplinary journal Representations, publishing the article, "Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas," in the first issue. That year, too, she published the first of her ground-breaking works in art history, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. The book's central thesis focused on the the immediacy and simplicity of Dutch painting and the Dutch preoccupation with the description of interiors and domestic scenes, contrasting it with narrative Italian painting. Iconographical approaches to baroque art, she wrote, such as those practiced by Erwin Panofsky and others, were insufficient to understand Dutch imagery. Her book likewise criticized mainstream Dutch scholarship and its reliance on emblems and emblemata books explain Netherlandish still life paining. The Art of Describing was well received, reviewers hailing Alper's mastery of topics as diverse as optics and perspective theory. Critics, however, accused her of selective use of evidence, drawing only from paintings and texts which supported her theories.
In 1988, during the era of shocking reattributions of many works of Rembrandt by the Rembrandt Research Project, Alpers published a monograph on the artist, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market The book examined Rembrandt's market strategies and his modeling his art to appeal to a Dutch consumer base. Her use of economic theory and a concerted avoidance of visual criteria again upset traditionalists in the art world.
Alpers co-wrote a book with fellow Berkeley art historian Michael Baxandall in 1994, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. She was named Professor Emerita from Berkeley in 1994. The following year she returned to the art of the low countries with her Making of Rubens. The book looked at Rubens' politics, his later critical reception in France, and theorized specific meaning in the recurring Silenus figures of his later work.
Reaction to Alpers was summed up by Walter Liedtke. In an article on American historians of Dutch art, he characterized her work as containing "whole exclusions" of art that did not fit her thesis--such as the Utrecht school--a "typical exercise in American taste dressed up (with some French motifs) as a new analysis of Dutch Art." However, her work Rembrandt's Enterprise was included among the 169 major writings of art history in the 2010 Hauptwerke der Kunstgeschicht
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 28, 2022
Dit is nu voor mij een prachtig voorbeeld van "eerst de conclusie schrijven en dan pas onderzoeken"; alleszins zo lijkt het toch. Ze beweert van alles over Rubens dat ze niet bewijst aan de hand van bronnen. De ogen hebben me zo vaak uit de kassen gerold bij het lezen. Enkele prachtige voorbeelden van ongestaafde theorieën is dat Rubens niet goed "Vlaams" kon schilderen omdat hij eigenlijk in het Roomse rijk was geboren en bijna altijd afwezig was voor diplomatie (??). Ze toont dit door hem te vergelijken met de boerentaferelen van Adriaen Brouwer en te wijzen op de verschillen. Ook dat hij zichzelf met Silenus zou associëren, is eigenlijk vrijwel een subjectief argument dat ze opstelt aan de hand van enkele schilderijen. Hieraan hangt ze een gendertheorie aan vast die er min of meer op neerkomt dat Rubens struggelde met zijn seksualiteit. Dat kan allemaal wel goed zijn maar bewijs het dan tenminste met wat bronnen. Ze zegt zelfs op een gegeven moment dat Rubens zich duidelijk comfortabeler voelt met het schilderen van taferelen waar mannen worden gedomineerd door vrouwen. Een tafereel als de Sabijnse Maagdenroof etc zouden "ongemakkelijk geschilderd" zijn. Dit is haar enige argument voor de stelling... Interressantste deel was hoe Rubens geconcipieerd werd in de 18e eeuw en hoe het werk van Roger de Piles invloed had op het zien van de stijl van Rubens als 'vrouwelijk' en die van Poussin als 'mannelijk'. Dat deel was degelijk en goed onderzoek en wél een aanrader. De rest was "Not my kind of art history" zoals mijn stagebegeleider mooi over dit boek zei. Groet Wout
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews