Impressionist Form: An Environmental History

VISUAL REPRESENTATION, MATERIALITY, AND MEDIUM

SPEAKERS: Harmon Siegel, Harvard Society of Fellows

In the early 1870s, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley painted the Machine de Marly, a system of pumps, dams, and locks that regulated the Seine. These pointedly asymmetrical, imbalanced views lack the structural linchpin of the same artists’ more typical riverscapes, in which the glassy water’s surface gathers and reflects its surroundings into one unified whole. In these scenes, the river models pictorial composition, doing naturally what painters do artfully. In fact, however, the very features that made the Seine so useful to the impressionists were conditioned by its deliberate engineering. My paper argues that these artists focalized this apparent paradox between nature and design to understand their distinctive project in environmental terms: the impressionists did not have to compose their landscapes because they came already composed, already formed.

About the Speaker

Harmon Siegel is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the author of Painting with Monet. His scholarship has appeared in Art Bulletin, American Art, and Nonsite, and he writes regular criticism for Artforum.