Alberts belongs to the small but coherent twentieth-century American current that continued to take classical and biblical mythology as serious subject matter for painting at a moment when most of American art had moved on — a tradition rooted in the older European academic practice but pursued, in his case, with a recognizably contemporary American hand.
Alberts's career belongs to a particular twentieth-century American tradition: the figurative painters who continued, against the postwar dominance of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism, to take the human figure and the classical-mythological subject as their working ground. The body of work he left at his death is characterized by close attention to narrative composition and the kind of allegorical reading that connects a contemporary painter back through Renaissance and Baroque practice to the original Greco-Roman sources.
His subjects ranged across the standard mythological repertoire of Western art — Europa carried by the bull, Actaeon's transformation under Diana's gaze, Adam and Eve at the moment of the Fall — and into more intimate figure subjects, including the long Christian-derived tradition of the Mother and Child. The choice was deliberate; in the decades when American painting was actively distancing itself from the inherited subjects of the Western canon, his commitment to that subject matter set him apart from the broader currents of his generation.
Documentation of his training, regional ties, and exhibition history is genuinely limited in published English-language sources, and the principal record of his career today is the body of work itself, which has continued to appear at auction in the decades since his death.
His position today is that of a respected representative of late twentieth-century American figurative and mythological painting, an artist whose body of work has continued to find an audience among collectors of figurative and academically grounded contemporary American painting.