WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.- Svetlana Alpers’s books have fundamentally changed people’s understanding of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and of Rubens, Tiepolo, and Velasquez, among others. Alpers, an artist and renowned art historian, will discuss her life, career, engagements, and interests with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s Starr Director of Research and Academic Programs Michael Holly and Williams College associate professor of art history Stefanie Solum on Tuesday, April 14, at 5:30 pm, at the Clark. Admission to “A Conversation with Svetlana Alpers” is free.

Alpers’s books—among them The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983); Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988); Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), written with Michael Baxandall; and The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (2005)—have had an enormous impact on art history. In 1983, Alpers founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations, now serving as editor. Alpers was recognized as the College Art Association’s ninth distinguished scholar at the annual conference in February. Inaugurated in 2001, the annual conference session pays tribute to a renowned scholar who has made significant contributions to the field.

Since its inception in 2000, the Clark’s Research and Academic Program has earned an international reputation as a foremost center for advancing the study of visual arts and for educating the next generation of art historians, professors, and museum directors and curators. The program engages the world’s most creative and innovative visual arts scholars, from Clark Fellows who travel to Williamstown from throughout the world to pursue their research while in residence at the Clark, to prominent participants in pioneering international research collaborations, this year underway with institutions based in Paris and Johannesburg.