Roof Life

Known for her provocative study, The Art of Describing, art historian Alpers’s latest book of essays is a series of discrete, eloquent meditations on the undervalued act of looking (“That sense of life seen at a distance, and my pleasure in it”) that don’t fall easily into the categories of art history, criticism, or memoir. What connects her stirring personal narratives is this elastic theme of distance: distance as a state of mind (one that is “sharpened by confronting things that are unfamiliar”) and distance as a condition of life—“the finding of and separating into one’s self.” Citing documents, letters, notes, and personal records, she puzzles out the life of her Russian-American father, the noted economist Wassily M. Leontief. From the windows of her New York flat, she studies the act of looking, which she says is under threat from “the visual age itself.” Through vivid vignettes, she explains how the act of distancing creates art. For example, confronting the unsavory art market in her effort to sell a small Rothko painting, she discovers that “the sense of letting go was when it struck me as a work of art.” This resonant, highly original writing is informed by the author’s background as an art historian, as well as shadowed by a sense of tremendous loss. “But to look is not to possess,” she writes. “An experience of loss is built-in.” (Aug.)