A major art historian reflects on a great tradition of European painting.

Velázquez 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 world — as it gets into painting — is 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 Velázquez acknowledge war and rivalry while offering a way out. The final chapters give a new account of Velázquez’s The Spinners, a ravishing painting which has been eclipsed by interest in the enigmas of Las Meninas. Alpers concentrates on the seventeenth century but also looks back to Velázquez’s predecessors Titian and Rubens and forward to his modern successors. She discusses Velázquez’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.

"The Vexations of Art is an engrossing, passionate attempt to re-engage with painting as a mode of thought at a time when `it is not clear in what form the resource of painting — for surely painting has been a singular resource of the greater European culture — will continue." (Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times)

A szerzőről:
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. She is the author of The Making of Rubens and, with Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, published by Yale University Press.