It seems more or less like a riddle, an art historian asking if art is history. No matter the combination of words mushed together like genetics—a Punnett square of art and art history—the pattern seems to repeat itself and turn inwards like a paradox. Regardless, the question is one that art historian Svetlana Alpers sets out to answer in her newest collection of writings, Is Art History?

Featuring writings collected across six decades, Is Art History finds Alpers’ foundational essays, including Art History and Its Exclusions (1982) and Style is What You Make It (1979), where Alpers’ critically writes, “To ask an art historian to speak on the subject of style is to expect something straight from the horse’s mouth… The questions are put to the student, but… We know the answers, for it is we who set, who validated the questions.” Alpers is potently aware of the facets of her identity that intersect art historian and art history. 

The author of books The Art of Describing, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (with Michael Baxandall), The Making of Rubens, The Vexations of Art, Roof Life, and the 2020 Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch, Alpers is both a scholar and lifetime writer of the arts. An academic who catalyzed revolutionary ways of thinking around Dutch Golden Age painting, specifically works by Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt, she stimulates notions surrounding European traditions of paintings.

With two unpublished lectures and new texts on contemporary artists, Alex Katz, Catherine Murphy and Shirley Jaffe, among others, Alpers’ Is Art History? launches at the Rizzoli Bookstore on September 26 via Hunters Point Press. You can find more info on the book launch here.