CAA News Today

The honoree of the 2009 Distinguished Scholar Session is Svetlana Alpers, a historian of seventeenth-century art and professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. Inaugurated in 2001, this Annual Conference session pays tribute to a renowned scholar who has made significant contributions to the field.

The Distinguished Scholar Session, entitled “Paintings/Problems/Possibilities” and chaired by Mariët Westermann of New York University, centers on the art of painting. The panel—which includes Alpers, Carol Armstrong of Yale University, Thomas Crow from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, the painter James Hyde, and Stephen Melville of Ohio State University—will focus on six pictorial images proposed by Alpers. The session takes place on Thursday, February 26, 2009, 2:30–5:00 PM, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 502AB, Level 2.

After earning a BA from Radcliffe College in 1957, Alpers completed her doctorate in fine arts at Harvard University in 1965. She began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early sixties and remained there until her retirement in 1994.

Her books—among them The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983); Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990; and Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), written with Michael Baxandall—have had an enormous impact on the discipline of art history. In 1983, Alpers founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations with Stephen Greenblatt; she remains a corresponding editor to this day.

An artist and a scholar, Alpers, together with James Hyde and the photographer Barney Kulok, recently completed a series of prints, Painting Then For Now. Fragments of Tiepolo at the Ca’ Dolfin, that is based on three paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the eighteenth-century Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo. An exhibition of these works was held at David Krut Projects in New York in 2007 and accompanied by a publication.

Alpers is CAA’s ninth distinguished scholar, joining a list of illustrious past honorees: Robert L. Herbert (2008), Linda Nochlin (2007), John Szarkowski (2006), Richard Brilliant (2005), James Cahill (2004), Phyllis Pray Bober (2003), Leo Steinberg (2002), and James Ackerman (2001).

Please read Mariët Westermann’s article on Svetlana Alpers and her accomplishments, which is also published in the November 2008 CAA News.

Leonardo López Luján, senior researcher and professor of archaeology at the Museo del Templo Mayor, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), in Mexico City, will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2009 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Convocation takes place at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Wednesday evening, February 25, 5:30–7:00 PM.

For nearly thirty years, López Luján has worked on the excavations of the Templo Mayor (Grand Temple), a fifteenth-century Aztec pyramid and its surroundings that are located in the heart of the Mexican capital; he has been director of the project since 1991. The temple lies beneath the Zócalo, also known as the Plaza de la Constitución, one of the largest public squares in the world. The project began when a monument to the Moon goddess Coyolxauhqui was found by electrical workers on the site of the old temple. During the last several years, other impressive monuments have been uncovered around the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, among them the largest Aztec sculpture ever found, that of the Earth goddess Tlaltecuhtli.

In his talk, López Luján will focus on the most recent archaeological discoveries, while giving an overview of the history of archaeology in the Aztec capital. He will also discuss other topics, among them the recovery of the Tlaltecuhtli stone, an iconographic analysis that may unveil this sculpture’s functions and meanings, the rich offerings buried underneath it, and the possible presence of a royal tomb in this area of the sacred precinct.

Currently senior researcher at the Museo del Templo Mayor, where he has worked since 1988, López Luján is also senior professor at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) and the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración, y Museografía (ENCRyM) since 1987. He earned his doctorate in archaeology, with highest honors, at the Université de Paris-X in Nanterre in 1998. Before that he attended ENAH from 1983 to 1990, receiving a BA and MA—also with highest honors. López Luján was a fellow in Precolumbian studies in 2005–6 at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and received a John S. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. He has also taught and researched in Rome and Paris and at Princeton University.

López Luján has written and cowritten many books on the archaeology of Central Mexico. In The Offerings of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan (originally published in Spanish in 1993; revised by the University of New Mexico Press in 2005), he presents the spectacular findings of Templo Mayor Project—masks, jewelry, skeletal remains of jaguars and alligators, statues of gods, precious stones, and human remains—from 1978 to 1997. The first English edition, published by the University Press of Colorado in 1994, was named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice and received the Eugene M. Kayden Humanities Award.

Mexico’s Indigenous Past, authored with Alfredo López Austin (1996; second English edition: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), offers a panoramic view of the three super-areas of ancient Mexico—Mesoamerica, Aridamerica, and Oasisamerica—which stretched from present-day Costa Rica to what is now the southwestern United States. The book begins more than thirty thousand years ago and ends with European occupation in the sixteenth century.

With Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, he is most recently the author of Breaking through Mexico’s Past: Digging the Aztecs with Eduardo Matos Moctezuma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), an overview of their work on the Museo del Templo Mayor.

For more on López Luján and the Templo Mayor, please download Johanna Tuckman’s “In Search of an Aztec King” from the Summer 2008 issue of American Archaeology.