Svetlana Alpers

Svetlana Alpers

Svetlana Leontief Alpers (born 1936) is an American art historian, also an artist and critic. She was a professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley from 1962 to 1998, where she is now Professor Emerita, and is one of the most influential American art historians of her generation. Her specialty was Dutch Golden Age painting, although she has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Breugel, and Velazquez, among others. She is a consultant to both National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has held many visiting academic appointments around the world.

She was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts the only child of Wassily Leontief political refugee from the Soviet Union, a Nobel laureate Economist who pioneered computer modelling, and poet Estelle Marks. She has 2 children, Benjamin Alpers (born in 1965) and Nicholas Alpers (born in 1968) and 4 grandchildren. Alpers received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1957 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1965.