Speaker: Harmon Siegel
Title: Impressionist Form: An Environmental History
Abstract: 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.
Image credit: Alfred Sisley, The Seine at Bougival, Winter's Morning, 1874.
LOCATION:HAA Room 422 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241114T223000Z DTEND:20241115T000000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR